Weak, Foolish, and Alone

Ecclesiastes chapter 4, beginning in verse 7. Again, I saw futility under the sun. There is a person without a companion, without even a son or brother, and though there is no end to all his struggles, his eyes are still not content with riches.

Who am I struggling for, he asked, and depriving myself of good things? This too is futile and a miserable task. Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their efforts. For if either falls, his companion can lift him up, but pity the one who falls without another to lift him up.

Also, if two lie down together, they can keep warm, but how can one person alone keep warm? And if someone overpowers one person, two can resist him. A cord of three strands is not easily broken. Better is a poor but wise youth than an old but foodless king who no longer pays attention to warnings.

For he came from prison to be king even though he was born poor in his kingdom. I saw all the living who move about under the sun follow a second youth who succeeds him. There is no limit to all the people who were before them, yet those who come later will not rejoice in him.

This too is futile and a pursuit of the wind. Let's pray. Father, just so thankful for so many things. Your abundance and goodness abound in every place around us. But Lord, we had confessed today that we're most thankful for the people you've put around us.

Lord, thank you for fellowship. Thank you for a church where people who are as diverse as the kaleidoscope are unified by the spirit of the living God. Father, thank you for your faithfulness to us, and we count on it today that you will deliver us a message that fuels us and empowers us to live an abundant and in a life that has purpose.

Thank you for hearing us. Use your preacher today to expound your truth. In Christ's name, amen.

Loneliness, Isolation, and the Pursuit of Riches

We all know that there's a problem out there with loneliness, and there's a lot of talk about the crashing birth rate in America, and yet it seems that we can't fix it. I was watching a Matt Walsh video this week.

It's the first time I've watched him in probably two months. He looks just like my brother, and I'll give Jake props. Jake is more handsome than him. I had to do that. But a lot of the tropes that we use all the time are just not true.

It has become popular for my generation to blame the loneliness in America on social media, and it's not true. Loneliness has been increasing in America since the early 70s, and the answers are elusive.

The numbers are staggering. We don't do what we used to do. It used to be a common thing for people to have dinner parties at least monthly. Now about 10 of the people in America have 12 gatherings of three or more of their friends at least 12 times a year.

You're a unicorn if you do that. Less than 10 of the population. And yet loneliness is crushing us. One of the great thinkers of our day, Ben Shapiro, says, if you're a young person and you can't afford to live here, then maybe you should not live here.

Words of encouragement that deeply accord with natural law, right? If you can't make money, go somewhere else and leave all of your family behind. This sounds like wisdom. And yet in the midst of this kind of popular idea, that Americanism is somehow the chase for money from corporations, forget your family.

Who cares about them? You're not going to have any kids anyway, so why would you need them? Here's where the numbers lead us. Loneliness we see in perfect accord with what Solomon writes in Ecclesiastes 4.

Loneliness reduces worker productivity by as much as 20 annually. A person who is lonely is up to 20 less effective than someone who has a vibrant social life. Adults who are lonely earn 12 less than their less lonely peers.

Adults who report feeling lonely have a 50 higher risk of developing dementia over six years. 89 of individuals with severe mental illness report frequent loneliness. 41 of United States adults report that they have no one to discuss important matters with.

And adults who report having three close friends have basically no risk of loneliness. And I would say, as I often say it's all in Tolkien, I would say even more truthfully, it's all in Solomon. Solomon wrote the book on wisdom, and he was right about all of his observations because foolishness abounds in isolation.

Where you find a man who is isolated, you will find a fool. And yet, I think, as I was talking to Corey about last night, and it's so amazing how the Holy Spirit illuminates things and just little facets that you didn't see during the week.

One of them came to me is that we look at Solomon with American eyes. And we think of Solomon this way. You don't have to raise your hand, but think about it in your mind. When we think Solomon was the wisest person to ever live, we think, well, he was doing it himself, right?

Who would he ask anything to? He's the one that knew everything. Why would he have counselors? And yet Solomon writes again and again that the wise man has many faithful counselors. Solomon was so wise because he surrounded himself by faithful counselors to give him advice.

And we see why we're lonely as Americans because we look at everything individualistically. We look at our faith at an individual perspective. It's all about your thoughts. It's all about your beliefs.

It has nothing to do with community because if you are worried about community, I mean, you're probably a Bolshevik socialist, right? Because that's the only people that care about groups. And yet we see over and over again the numbers don't lie.

When you start embracing riches and isolation, you will start living in isolation and your productivity will go down. Could this country today do the things that the country was able to do 100 years ago?

I would say it's doubtful. We don't have the shared spirit of ingenuity, the shared spirit of industriousness, the zeal to get a job done. And the reason why is because we are very isolated. We have no mission.

And when we look at the church and we bring that lens here to the church, we see that a church flails around because for too long, the mission has been to get people to admit that they believe the same things about us as God, but then there's no mission.

You arrived, right? Like when you get saved and you pray the prayer, you've now arrived. You're there. And that's not what the Bible says. The Bible calls us to greater things. The Bible calls us to work.

And then when we look at the family, our families languish. Even when parents stay together, our families languish from a lack of mission. What is the point? Is the point just to have the kids? Or is the point to do something, to propel the mission forward as a family?

Children, Family, and the Mission of Discipleship

And we see as Solomon is going to rebound back. Remember at the end of chapter two, Solomon talked about how there is vanity in the pursuit of inheritance because the guy that you're going to give it to, your son, he's probably going to screw it up anyway.

It's foolishness. And remember we talked about how Solomon was probably looking at his sons going, I have this great kingdom and the chances that it carries on are small. I mean, he had to know what was bound up in his son's heart, who was going to inherit the kingdom.

And Solomon looked at it and said, this is vanity. But then Solomon goes into balance here in chapter four, and he starts to talk about the futility and the foolishness of the man who toils for riches and has no one to give it to.

That's what he says. He looks again at vanity under the sun, and this is his discourse on labor, right? This is where Solomon is. He's talking about labor. And he says, I looked again at the foolishness, the vanity under the sun.

There was a man without a second man. He's all alone. He has neither a son nor a brother, yet there was no end to all his labor. Think Bill Gates. Is there any end to the labor? And he grasped for immortality because in his heart of hearts, Bill Gates knows that in 30 years, no one will have ever heard of him.

He was a titan of industry, right? But where's the lineage? Where's the succession? And Solomon looks at men like that, and Solomon says, it is a grievous endeavor. It is an evil endeavor. It is a terrible, oppressive endeavor because this man who has nothing, he is striving for immortality in his riches, in his innovations, and he has no one to give it to ever, but he has to keep getting more.

Now, we saw this last week. This is not disconnected, right? At the beginning of this chapter, we saw the foolishness of oppression and how the one who oppresses has no comfort. And the reason he has no comfort is because there's no end to his covetousness.

There's no end to his desire for stuff. And so this man that Solomon is looking at, he has no one to give it to, and yet he has a drive to just gain more and more and more. Does this not perfectly describe the attitude of the typical American for the last 80 years?

Kids are a curse. They're hard work. They cost you money. They're going to really get in the way of your vacations. They're going to get in the way of going to the concerts that you want to go to. The best thing to do is maybe have one so that you can say you did that, but they're kind of in the way.

They're an accessory, right? What you really want to do is travel the world. What you really want to do is buy a huge house and go on cruises. That is what has been termed lately luxury boomer communism, okay?

I don't want to throw a lot of knives at generations because I think what has happened is we are infected with this idea that children are bad. And if you look at loneliness and you take it back to the 70s, what happened?

We legalized the slaughter of children. And so what follows? If children are an inconvenience to be killed, then children also are an inconvenience in your marriage, and what you have to do is you have to get all the material things you want.

And we know this, right? The material things don't satisfy because the things that satisfy us the most deeply are our shared connections with other people. Every time. We had a great gathering last night.

Lots of fun. Huge conversations with all kinds of people. Kelsey asked me, who did you talk to? And I was like, everybody. Well, who did you really talk to? All of them. All the guys, right? It was an amazing thing.

And you know what was never a thought in my mind the whole time? Man, that was a huge TV they had out there. Never a thought. Oh, that seat was really uncomfortable. Never thought about that. Didn't think about the stuff at all.

All of the satisfaction came from being with Christian brothers. All of it. You can't buy it. And yet, the one who has given in to the idea of material wealth continually strives to buy that contentment that only comes from the only way legacy was ever given to human beings, which is through your children.

Adam's remembered because he had many descendants. Abraham famously is remembered because of what? The descendants. And especially the seed. The one descendant. What a foolishness there is in having no lineage.

And yet, I give you encouragement. The war on this is raging. And guys, I know you're not doing this, so I'm going to have encouragement for you. This is not a prevailing mind frame in this church, obviously.

Right? You can hear it every week. And I know there's more coming. Praise God for that. And that there will be more after that. And that is, we're acting like Presbyterians that our evangelistic strategy here is just have lots of babies.

Alright? We're already Baptists, so that one's off to us. We can't recruit Baptists. Okay? That's the Presbyterian way. But we have to understand what we're up against. And I see this in the front lines every single day.

As I go to school, and I have conversations with teenagers, and I say, Hey, you going to have any kids? No, no, I wouldn't do that. It's like all of them. They all say that. No, I don't want any kids.

Why? It's hard. The war on wisdom rages. And there is a gender gap. As you might expect, 14 of women say that we do not have enough children. And 30 of men say that. So about one in every six of women says we don't have enough children.

Do you guys understand the catastrophe that is brewing in our country right now? We are dying. The birth rate is well below replacement. And it's like the fire meme where if you ask the typical woman in America, the whole house is on fire, and she's saying this is fine while she's sipping her tea.

And probably posting it on Instagram, not knowing. Among conservatives, so you identify yourself as conservative, 27 of women now say that we don't have enough children, and 47 of men. So we're almost a half on the men.

So then, you know what? It's amazing. I brought this study. I was reading it this week, and there was a student who was sitting at my desk. What are you doing? I said, I'm researching attitudes on birth rates and loneliness.

And she said, well, what did you find? And I just read her those numbers, and do you know what she said? It couldn't be more perfect. And I promise you this is true. You know what she said? Of course men would say that.

Guys, if you don't think, if you don't think that feminism has spiked the ball and is doing touchdown dances in the end zone right now, you don't understand what's out there. There is no checking to this attitude.

Right? Of course men would say that. Look, it's a fact. And you know what Solomon says? This attitude is a grievous endeavor. Your goal in life is not to go on vacation. The goal in life is not to hit the point where you can buy the sports car, as much as I sometimes would like it to be in my foolishness.

The point of life is to make disciples. Do you know where the primary ground to make disciples is? It's in the home. It's who you have the most influence on. It's who you nurture. It's who you cherish.

And that starts with loving your wife or your husband. And then it goes to not provoking your children to anger. And it goes to teaching them diligently what you've been taught to obey Christ's commands.

That's what we have to do. And friends in here who are not listening to this, I want to give you encouragement. This work is slow. It's very slow. And if you have four and five year olds right now, if your oldest is seven or eight, all you see right now is the hardship and the tiredness.

What you don't see yet is that there is a massive harvest coming. And the longer and the harder that things are, the greater the reward. And then at the end of this, we see, we talk every week about coming to the table and having spiritual eyes.

And what we have to understand is though there are very much earthly goods that we have to go for here, there is also a thing where Jesus says that we are to store up our treasures in heaven. I think too often Christians think that that means getting your beliefs right.

No, Jesus is saying store your treasures up in heaven. That is people. That is people. You're not going to worry about stuff in heaven, are you? The streets are paved with gold. You're not going to worry about riches.

What are you going to enjoy in heaven? You're going to enjoy the people. That's what we were made to do. And that's what Christ is going to give us. He is going to give us a people with no sin that will never lie to you.

And we want as many people there with us as we can. That's what it means to store up your treasures in heaven. Is that you store up people who you will commune with in heaven. Different way of thinking about it.

Did you know that God is not primarily concerned about what your beliefs are? He's primarily concerned about the condition of your heart. Are you regenerate or not? Because he's doing the work on your beliefs.

He is sanctifying you. And if you have stupid ideas about children are hard and they're bad and all that, you need to repent of that immediately. That is a sinful thing that is in direct opposition to what the word of God teaches.

However, if you have embraced it, brother or sister, I give you great encouragement. Look around at the kids. Your job is not done and you have to redouble your zeal to educate them, to disciple them, to not provoke them, to work on your marriage so that it is a place of strength and a refuge for your kids and understand that God will normatively over and over again bless that work.

And you will have riches that you could have never imagined. While we see a generation dying alone in nursing homes after they exhausted all of their wealth going on cruises in the Caribbean with no one left to take care of them, you will have an army to take care of you someday.

That's the vision. And there's a lot of work that has to be done to turn it around because this ship has been going towards the iceberg for a long time now. It's all in Solomon and I spent way too long on that.

Friendship as Mutual Help, Productivity, and Protection

So here we go. Let's move on. This is the part I was really going to spend a long time on. So here we go. Warnings. There is goodness in numbers. This is a hobby horse of mine and I'm so glad that I get to preach it this morning.

Friendship is crucial. Crucial. If you don't have friends, you need to be diligent about trying to find them. And just like I just said about kids, building friendships is long, difficult work with a lot of false starts, a lot of disappointment, bitterness that happens.

It'll make you want to quit except the prize at the end is so worth the pursuit. What does Solomon say? Two are better than one because they have good wages for their labor. If either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion, but woe to the one who falls when there is not a second one to lift him up.

Furthermore, if two lie down together, they keep warm. But how can one be warm alone? We think technology's made it possible for us to be warm alone, and yet we find over and over again that it has not.

It has not. There is no warmth like the company of one who is closer than a brother. No warmth like that. If one can overpower him who is alone, two can stand against him. A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart.

The first point that Solomon makes is that two people working together increases productivity. I can tell you this. I will give you a story. When I was 14 years old, I got my first job, and Dad would drive me to it.

It was working on a breeder hen farm. It was rough, all right? Most of my job was scraping chicken manure, okay? And there was all these nests, and what would happen is, Dan, we pulled them out of the chicken houses, and I would go out there alone eight hours a day with a putty knife pulling the bottom of these nests out and scraping manure off of it.

I don't want to tell you how nasty it was. Just suffice it to say, it was nasty. And the ones that got wet, it was really nasty, okay? And yet, here I am. I'm toiling. I'm toiling out here. I brought a big old jug of ice water, and it would be out there, and I brought a radio so I could listen to Rush Limbaugh, okay?

And I'm out. This is my life, all right? So I'm out here in 1994, and I'm scraping these nest bottoms, and it seems like it'll never be done. There's thousands of them. It's so mind-boggling. And yet, one day, I guess my brother gets bored, or maybe he had to get out of the house.

I can't remember what happened. He's a little kid. He's 10 years old. So that morning, Dad drives Jake out with me, and he didn't do anything, all right? He was 10. He wasn't going to get a putty knife and scrape the nasty chicken manure with the maggots off of the nest bottoms.

That was not what he was going to do. However, I will just tell you, and this has always amazed me to this day, the truth of the Scripture. I got at least twice as much work done that day. Incredible thing.

He didn't do any work. That's not an insult. He was 10 years old, all right? But just, it's an amazing thing that Solomon hits on. Imagine if he was older, and we were able to work together. We probably would have had five times the productivity.

The moral of the story is this, is that human beings, it is not good, it was never good for us to be alone, was it? When Adam was in the garden, God said, it's not good for him to be alone, and so God made him a companion out of his own flesh.

And so it is that it is not good for us to work alone. We work much better when we are with people. There is a synergistic effect to it. And yet, and yet, we often pretend like this is folly. It's actually better if you just do it all yourself.

In fact, the church, we should have 50 people all doing their own thing. Egalitarianism, right? What was it I think I said about it last night? Egalitarianism is hating everybody equally. All right? Everybody's got a job to do and they all need to do it alone.

That is not the way God has created the world. People on mission are synergistic, but we also see not only is it more profitable when people work together, but it also creates fail-safes and protection.

It's not good for me to be an elder alone because that is a fragile situation where I don't get to bounce my ideas on the scripture off of a fellow laborer and worker who's at the same station. If I go down, then we don't have an elder, but when there are two, we have resilience.

There is a fail-proof thing here where when one person falls, the other can pick them up. It's not good for us to work alone. It's not good for us to persist in being alone. And there are many that sin that way today.

They persist selfishly that they will just be alone. And the reason is because they've been taught that technology can fulfill all their needs, and it can't. It's not good then. It's not good now. Men, you know this, and women, you know this too.

Men especially, you know that it's good when you have someone who you can trust, but that person who trusts you, he doesn't act like your mom, does he? He doesn't try to comfort you under a blanket. What he does is he tries to push you.

He sharpens you. And then you fight each other, but you better beware if somebody tries to fight either one of you that's from outside, right? You fight each other, but you try to kill the people who come in from the outside.

That's what brotherhood is like. And men strive for that. Men desire that. To be cold and alone, it works on your psyche. It messes with you. I watch a show called Alone. I don't know if some of you guys have seen it.

They draw a person out there in the wilderness, and they just have a camera. And you can see what happens is it messes with people's minds, okay? They go five, six days. These guys are all outdoorsmen.

And then after about five or six days, several of them are like, I don't know. I don't know what I'm gonna do. I miss my wife, and they tap out. They weren't hungry yet. Nothing happened to them. It's just that being alone is not the way we're supposed to be.

It messes with you. We see that it is very difficult to attack someone who has a band of brothers. So let me ask you this. Does this define you? Are you a three-stranded cord? Do you have one who will pick you up when you fall down?

Do you have one who is sharpening you like iron? And there is a ditch that Solomon will warn us about in Proverbs 18 that's on the other side of this. And he says that it's a curse to have too many friends.

So what's Solomon mean by that? When you have too many friends, it means you likely don't have any friends. That's what it means. Because God has built us with limited capacity. And Jesus modeled the whole thing for us, did he not?

Jesus had 12 men who were running around with him all over the place. But even within that 12, there were three that were not like the others, right? He had three who were very, very close to him, who knew his inner thoughts, who were hearing him pray by himself.

Now, did Jesus have limited capacity? No, I sure hope not, right? He's God, okay? He did not have limited capacity, but Jesus was teaching us by example that there are ways and rhythms the way the world works, and that is that we have to have people.

Two is better than one, and three is better than two, okay? You are a strong cord if you are bound up, and you have two brothers who will walk beside you. We have to be careful with this. There are easy ways that people jump into friendship.

One of them is the shared enemy strategy. Guys, this is definitional in our camp. If you've not been around the Reformed camp long, let me illuminate it to you. With a bunch who is so hopped up on their own doctrine, we take it to task, and what we do is we develop relationships by who we hate, and you see it over and over again, and that should not be us.

Now, look, we can join together against a common enemy. We have to make sure that that enemy is actually an enemy, not someone who disagrees with us. The enemy is trying to take down the cause of Christ.

The enemy is making malicious war on the saints, and sometimes Christians act like enemies, and that does not give us the latitude to be able to treat them like enemies. We are contra Scripture when we treat Christian brothers as enemies.

We have to refuse. Peter tells us in his discourse on reviling that we are to never repay reviling for reviling because there was one man who never did. The Lord Jesus never repaid reviling for reviling, but instead, he laid down his life for those who hated him and that he won into the kingdom.

Can that not be us? So be careful, friends. Your trauma bonding or your shared enemy is a shallow way to start a friendship. Now, to be sure, it can start you fellowshipping, it can start you talking, but be careful, men especially.

Don't start acting like women and involving yourself in petty gossip when you get together to take down an enemy without ever looking them in the eye. That is effeminate, womanly behavior. Don't do it.

What you have to do instead is you spur one another to good works. We are not defined by who we're against, but if we want to have friends that stick closer than brothers, we have to be loyal to them.

We have to nurture trust, honesty, loyalty, mission-mindedness. We have to be able to purge the sin from our midst. That's what the Israelites were told in the wilderness. They were to purge the sin from their midst.

They were not to let their eyes pity the sin that was among them. And friends, it's the same way with us. We are not to tolerate one another's sins. We are to purge it from our midst, and that's going to hurt sometimes.

And those of you who don't have these close friends, it's going to be difficult because you're going to think they're attacking you and they're actually attacking the sin. Now, those of you who are attacking the sin, make sure you're actually attacking the sin.

Be careful. Pull the log out of your own eye before you try to get the speck of dust. And what that means is not that you're without sin. It means that you are penitent and humble in your own sinfulness before you go out trying to pull planks out of other people's eyes.

And there are planks aplenty because we are all sinners. But a good friend feels confident to tell you when you are messing it up. And they don't make you feel comfortable in your sin. They make you feel comfortable in the loyalty and the bonds that you have as friends.

Building Lasting Friendships Through Patience and Trust

If you don't have friends like this, it's going to take time. Proximity is a big deal. I will tell you a disappointment that I'm learning to grapple with is when this church was planted, my fondest hope would be that it would be a church of members who all lived within like 15 minutes of the building.

I did because I thought, you know, the community, it'll be so much easier for us to get together. The reality of the situation is we are Reformed and therefore we are going to have people coming from a long ways away.

It's the curse of Reformed. You have to hear the Calvinism. You have to hear the covenantal stuff. I get it. I've got it too. I understand that. But it does cause issues with us because proximity is critical to friendships.

It's really difficult to make it a long way. And a lot of people move in from out of the area and they don't have those bonds of fellowship. That's what's so evil about what Shapiro said. Shapiro said, trade isolation for wealth and Solomon says that is grievous.

That's a terrible thing to do. Friends, it's going to take time. There are many reasons to leave a church. Many reasons. There are many good reasons to leave a church. But understand, understand that if you're looking for friends in the church, I think that that's a worthwhile endeavor.

It's a good endeavor. However, that is not the church's purpose. The church's purpose is to make disciples. Now, an ancillary blessing of that is the outflow that there will be good relationships in the church and there will be friendships.

But it takes time. It takes time. You're not going to make a best friend in six months. You're not going to make a best friend in two years. It's going to take time. And every time you start over socially, you reset the clock and it grows in frustration.

It's a difficult task to make friends. It takes embedding. It takes getting yourself into situations where you don't know the end jokes. You don't know the common vernacular of the group and yet you come in and you listen and you're patient and I will tell you there is an example of that that beams in my mind and that is my best friend Brady.

He came in to my game night thing and he didn't understand anything we were talking about but through years he stayed there. He got his head smashed in at video games week after week. He didn't know what we were talking about.

That is an insult actually and he kept coming and he kept coming and after a while he becomes a natural part of the group. It didn't take six months. It took like four years. Frustrating, right? But just as your kids are not finished products when they're three, your friendship is not going to happen and think about the friends that you have.

When you are blessed with those I was out and hanging out with some really close friends this week and I started to realize the one that I knew the least amount of time I think I've known him 30 years.

Crazy. The shared experiences that happen and it comes from family connections. It comes from growing up together. It comes from trusting each other in hardship and that stuff guess what? You have to have hardship if you're going to trust somebody.

You have to see that they are going to tell you the truth. You have to resist evil together. You have to resist the attacks of the enemy and through that comes brotherhood and it is one of the sweetest things that you can possibly have and it's here in this place people.

It is here in this place but it's not coming to you. You have to go get it. You have to be aggressive. You have to check in. You have to ask questions. You have to involve yourself. You might have to get rejected and then you move on.

You don't have to be with best friends with everybody who's in here but there can be friendships in here and it has to do with taste, affinity, proximity. There's all kinds of things and what I tell you is don't get frustrated in the task but keep chasing it and maybe five years from now you have this thing and it keeps you warm because there is comfort.

Look at what Solomon says about friendship. He says that you're going to output more, more profit, more fruit. He says that you're going to have protection from despair and failure. We saw that in the study.

That's stats, right? People aren't lonely that have friends because they can tell somebody. How horrifying is it to be one of the respondents that says, I don't have anybody that I can talk about important stuff with.

That is terrifying to me. There are numerous men that I can call to talk about important things. It was a blessing to be a part of one of those conversations this week. Stuff that didn't have to do necessarily with spiritual stuff.

It was wisdom stuff with finances. It is an honor every time to be trusted that way. It's an honor to be able to speak in. There is protection from despair. There is protection from failure because it's not all on you.

There is warmth and comfort. Imagine being a soldier up in the highlands when the wind blows and it's cold and you got nobody with you back in Solomon's time. That would be a terrible thing. But you could lay back to back and have warmth from the chill of the night with your soldier buddy and you're also protected because one can keep watch and one can sleep.

That's how God has made the world. There is much protection of enemies and friends, the reason the church is so listless, one of the reasons this happens is because we don't have three stranded cords.

We are easily fooled, easily broken, easily distracted and the reason for that is like the culture we have abandoned friendship. We've abandoned it. So I ask you church, if you get nothing else today, let me highlight it because we're getting to the fun part next.