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Sermon by Josh Rice from Ecclesiastes 1:12-18.
I, the preacher, have been king over Israel and Jerusalem, and I set my mind to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all that has been done under heaven. It is a grievous task which God has given to the sons of men to be afflicted with.
I've seen all the works which have been done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be straightened, and what is lacking cannot be counted. I said to myself, behold, I have magnified and increased wisdom more than all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my mind has observed a wealth of wisdom and knowledge, and I set my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly.
I realize that this also is striving after wind, because in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain. Let's pray. Father, what a joy it is to be here, Lord.
Thank you so much for your word. Lord, thank you so much for salvation. Lord, you have gifted us all with levels of wisdom. Lord, I pray that you would bless us, Lord, that you would let us be a church of wisdom, that we would look to you and to trust you.
Lord, teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Lord, I pray that you would bless the preaching of your word this morning, Lord, that you would fulfill your promises, Lord, that you would sanctify us and edify us with your word and the preaching of your word.
Lord, we love you and we praise you.
Amen. James 1 .5, the Proverbs of the New Testament says, but if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him. I don't know why I have to still read that.
I've probably quoted that verse more than any besides maybe Ephesians 2, 8 through 10. And then Solomon writes in Proverbs 2, 2 through 4, to make your ear pay attention to wisdom, incline your heart to discernment, for if you call out for understanding, give your voice for discernment.
If you seek her as silver and search for her as for hidden treasures. So the Bible tells us, Solomon tells us, that we are to seek for wisdom, that we are to seek discernment like it is a treasure, that we are to ask God for it.
The Bible is in perfect harmony, and yet our passage this morning leads us to a first question. That question is, did Solomon change his mind? Is even wisdom fruitless, futile vanity? A wooden literalist reading of this text would lead you to believe that.
It says what it says, right? And so the Bible is in paradox. It's in, it has a contradiction here. What are we to do with that? And yet in reading Ecclesiastes, I laid out last week that it's extremely important to always note the phrases, on the earth, under the sun, and then in the heavens.
There's a difference between the two. And I think that many of us do not take the text as saying, oh, okay. So everything we do, like we can't accomplish anything, we kind of know that internally, right?
And what that has led to is that our body doesn't matter. The only thing that matters at all is what will last eternally. And so what we need to do is get in our prayer closet and pray, hope that we survive until the rapture comes, and then someday, maybe, we will get to live in glory as long as we are holy enough.
And by the way, we must constantly post on social media about what we're doing there and tear anyone else down. The issue is this, is that there is wisdom in Ecclesiastes. It's a book of wisdom. And in order to interpret wisdom, you have to be wise.
It's pretty important. And we have to remember that Solomon is writing to his sons, to kings of Israel. And what we know very tragically is that Solomon's son did not listen to his wisdom. He did not.
And there was tremendous grief, suffering, and condemnation from God that came from Solomon's sons not listening to his wisdom. Because Solomon's son, first and foremost, chased after everything that Solomon had said is worthless to chase after.
So we have to get to a few things. Every person who is not, and I don't use this as an insult, every person who is not simple-minded is going to come confronted with the question at some point, what is this all for?
Why am I here? Does God exist? How can a good God allow so much evil to go on? How can a good God allow those who hate him to prosper? These are good questions. These are difficult questions. And we get from Solomon that these are questions that man is given in the human condition.
And it's grievous, it's wearisome. Solomon himself, Solomon himself looked and he gave his heart to seek and explore by wisdom concerning all that is done under heaven. It's a grievous endeavor which God has given to all the sons of men with which to occupy themselves.
So let me ask this, and let me challenge the modern evangelical view of heaven and earth and what's going on between. Remember, Christ's kingdom is not of this world, which correctly means that Christ's kingdom is not of the substance of this world.
It came from somewhere else, but it owns this world. That's the proper teaching. But we also have to understand here that there is an interaction. Can any man, if we know, even if we know that toiling under the sun is futile, it's worthless, nothing that you get here is going to last.
That is all true. Solomon rightly writes that down. But does any man get to escape toiling under the sun? No. You will toil under the sun. You will seek understanding under the sun. You will seek solutions under the sun.
You will strive for gain under the sun. Now, what is noted about wisdom and those who have wisdom through Christ, who is the treasury of wisdom, is that in Christ, we have some peace in that strife. And without Christ, there's no peace.
And there's a constant hole that is trying to be filled in. It's a lack of satisfaction. It is going to be tried to be filled in by all kinds of things. It might be women, it might be drugs, it might be money, it might be the pursuit of work, or in many, and what Solomon takes aim at this morning, is it might be intelligence.
In our country, at least growing up, our country valued intelligence highly. Think about who makes it at school. Think about all of the social structures that sort out humanity in America. It stacks us up largely based on intelligence with credentials.
And Solomon will lump this, even as an affliction, that is futile. And in fact, he's going in today by saying the smartest man in the world is the most grieved man in the world. Because the smartest man is he gnaws out every bit of information that he can get.
He just learns that he's no closer to solving the problems than he was when he started. That is what it is to be human. Because remember, as Romans says, that all creation groans because it was subjected to the curse by Christ until he comes back to remove the curse.
So Solomon asked for wisdom, revisiting. We're gonna be looking, the first part that we're looking here is gonna be titled understanding the world is grievous. The more you understand the world, the more frustrated you're gonna get.
The more you understand the world, the more despairing you might feel. The more you understand the world, the sadder, the more despondent, the angrier you're going to feel. And Solomon knew it better than anyone ever.
Solomon asked for wisdom. He received it in unprecedented measure. And then after attaining this wisdom, which remember we read it out of Kings last week, when Solomon attained the wisdom, the reason he asked for the wisdom was so that he would judge God's glorious people rightly.
He needed to know the ways of the world. He needed to understand God's law. He needed to understand how to listen to people's problems and solve their problems in the right way. If you've read the law of God, the law of God gives specific answers to many specific questions, but it doesn't give specific answers to every question.
There is wisdom in interpreting the law. There are not blanket penalties for every crime. And so the judge must listen, the judge must weigh out, and the judge must mete out justice in a righteous way.
It's not an easy thing to do. It's not easy being a judge. And so we should have the wisest being judges that have discernment. And Solomon had this more than anyone who ever lived. He understood God's law better than you ever will.
He understood how to listen and to weigh out a case better than any judge in human history has understood. And so he searched, given this wisdom, he started to look out and try to understand the world.
And we see this in Ecclesiastes, over and over what Solomon is doing is he is observing everything under the sun in an attempt to gain knowledge and understanding of it. He is watching the human condition.
He is looking at what people do. He is looking at psychology. He is looking at systems of incentives and consequences. And he is looking at how people respond to God's law, how people respond to power, how people respond to being mad and stupid and ignorant.
And also he's looking at how people respond to tremendous intellect and wisdom. And he is trying to figure all of this out. And he had time to do it because if you remember Solomon's dad, he was quite a notable man, wasn't he?
King David, he was a fearsome man. And because of David's war prowess, David had subjected the world and there was peace in Jerusalem. And so as it happens in peacetime, there is time for people to search out life's philosophical questions.
When there is not peacetime, people are not worried about the professors in the universities, they are worried about getting their house ransacked and killed by invaders. David had won the peace, Solomon benefits from it, and so he has given time to study.
Nobody's attacking him, he has all the chariots, he has all the horses, he has all the gold, and he has all the time to listen. No one can do that. So friend, I ask you, if you think that you are trying to investigate the world's problems so that you can come up with a solution to them, you don't have the tools to get to where Solomon was and his end result is, it's just gonna make you sad.
Now, does that mean you should stop? Not necessarily, but maybe. It requires wisdom. Wisdom, it always comes back to wisdom with Solomon. And Solomon in his search, he arrives at three early conclusions that you will see in verses 13 through 15.
If you look at them, first, the first conclusion that Solomon arrives at is that God has afflicted all humans with the burden to understand what it is all for. The reason that people ask the question, why am I here, is not because they came up with it in their intellect, it's because God made you ask that question.
He wants you to ask that question. It is not anti-God to wonder why we're here, it's very much because of God that we ask that question, and it's because we're not cattle, and we're not like the animals.
We have morals, we have a soul, and we have a strong desire to know our creator. Now, in rebellion, that desire is turned upside down and subjected to wrath and futility. But nonetheless, every person is going to ask the question, why am I here?
And Solomon tells us the reason why is because God made you ask that question. But Solomon uses an interesting word, right? He afflicted you with that question. Just like you would be afflicted with an illness.
Now, why is it an affliction? Well, I think, quite simply, the reason it's an affliction is because, A, we don't have the tools to know, but B, because through our federal head, Adam, we are born in rebellion and in iniquity.
And so our very start at answering that question is in rebellion, which is futility itself. Can you imagine being in rebellion against the one who created everything with his words? How stupid is that?
How stupid is it to hate God? How stupid is it to think that you're going to bargain with him and bend him to your will? It's foolish. But that's his first conclusion. We have been afflicted with this.
Second, there is no gain in all the works done under the sun. It is empty. The word that he's going to use over and over again means that it's like trying to catch fog. It's like trying to catch a mist.
It's all floating around. And you striving for gain is like trying to catch fog or mist in your hand, and then you open your hand and there's nothing there. That's his second conclusion. His third is that there are twists and deficiencies in the world which are unfixable and unsolvable.
What is bent cannot be straightened, and what is lacking cannot be counted. And to search and search into the human condition is going to try to understand fundamentally why do people do such evil things?
Why? It was my first week back in high school. I know Bailey can relate this week, probably more than I can. But I'll tell you, often you ask the question when observing the human condition, and the question is simple like, why did you do that?
Why did you say that? Why do you think that way? Do you not understand where this is going to lead you to? It's perfectly obvious to see. There's nothing new under the sun. If you're a lazy slacker drunk or pothead, more apt in our day, the world is not gonna be an easy place for you, and we can all see it.
And what are you gonna do? You're just gonna continue to be twisted. There's no answer. It's not welfare. It's not soup kitchens. You can't solve an unsolvable problem. Jesus himself said that the poor will always be with us.
You can't solve poverty. Why? It's an unsolvable problem, and everyone who tries seemingly makes it worse. That's what Solomon's talking about. There is lacking that cannot be counted. In other words, you're missing something, and the whole chart, Brian, Jake, no matter how meticulous you are about putting in the spreadsheet and about calculating the numbers and seeing where does it all come from, at the end of the day, there's something there.
You just can't find it. I don't know why. It's gone. That's what Solomon says. He puts pen to paper and finds out, I can't figure out why this has come up short. There's no answer. Can you imagine how frustrating that is to a guy like Solomon?
You can't fix everything. Sometimes you can't fix anything. And then Paul writes, and I wanna bring this back as we talk about wisdom, because we have to take a whole survey of how Scripture looks at wisdom.
A long time ago, we went through this passage in 1 Corinthians 1, verse 25, Paul writes, because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. Here's the thing.
Human beings are afflicted with this. Remember, the burden of philosophy endlessly and vainly asks this question. Why are we here? Have the philosophers ever answered the question? For every one philosopher that's the biggest genius that we've ever seen, there are five more geniuses who disagree with every part of his premise.
To take a philosophy class is to be more confused, not less. And I don't care how smart you are. You're gonna read smarter people, and they're confused, and you're confused, and no one gets closer to the answer.
And Paul says, take Aristotle. Anybody in here wanna match wits with him? Solomon was much smarter than him. Take all of them. And Paul says that the foolishness of God is much, much, much wiser than them.
And what was the foolishness of God? The foolishness of God was that he saw a man's sinful condition, and he sent his own son to make atonement through his blood. And man looks at that and says, that's stupid.
Why would you do that? Why would an innocent man, the second person of the Godhead, why would he die for a bunch of people who are so cursed, so ugly, so futile? Because his foolishness is far wiser than the wisest we've ever seen here.
And so the burden of philosophy that we are all afflicted with to some degree or another is to continually ask the question, why are we here? And some people get stuck in the spiral. Many people do. And it most often hits people, I think, in their young 20s, their early 20s.
And the question, has everything I've been taught been a lie? That's the question. Who can I believe? Well, I'll tell you who I can't believe, the person who's talking to me right now, because you obviously don't, you haven't read what I've read.
And so the foolishness is to languish and keep swimming in this stream where there are no answers because all of it comes down to this, either what God said is true or we have absolutely nothing. The atheists are right about this.
If what God said is not true, then we are all ugly bags filled with water who are completely meaningless and everything we do is absolutely stupid. Why would we even care? If somebody makes you mad, just kill them.
The strong survive, right? Might makes right. Without God, that's what humans are. And so the fact that humans, even the ones who hate God and don't believe in Him, the fact that they don't do that shows itself that God is real because He restrains their evil desires even though they hate Him.
That's what the Noahic covenant is all about. He has written us to restrain evil so that we would not go to that place again where He has to wipe us out. Incredible God's wisdom. God has appointed all to have this task.
And many strive, many vainly deny to their dying breath until they see the error of their ways tragically. Now, some of us, this hits very hard for me. You know who is in this room who does not strive vainly in the philosophical questions?
Well, Paul tells us. It's mostly the fools and the weak people of this age. Sorry to do this again. Gandalf, many times in the Lord of the Rings, the wisest man there is, he describes himself often as an old fool.
As I often say, it's all in Tolkien that the wisest, most powerful, truth-seeking character in the story would refer to himself often as one who has a fool's hope. An old fool. And that is because in a deeply Christian sense where the scripture teaches us time and time again, the only people who believe in God are the fools of this age because God has precisely saved you, my friend, to show not your glory but His glory.
And the weaker and the worse you are, the higher and the more beautiful He is. And what happens is when He sees all of us idiots and all of us people who have sinned so grievously and all of us people who are nothing to look at at all and nothing, we don't have any profound wisdom out there and the world looks at us and they despise their creator because He is storing up their wrath for them all the while others see us languishing around and they say, ooh, I'm really bad too.
Did God, could it be possible, could it be possible that the creator loved me? And that's the magnetism of the gospel, is it not? The gospel is good news. Do you remember that? Do you remember, church, that we have the words of life, that the gospel is the hope of all mankind?
The only thing that's not vain struggling on this earth is the eternal message of the treasuries of God's wisdom. Seek that. We're not here because we're awesome. We're here because we were those who are to put the wise of this world to shame.
And I think we often do. And yet the church trades this in to gain the approval of the wise and the powerful of this age, thus stripping the glory of God from ourselves and seeking the glory of the approval of man.
And Solomon would warn and he would say, that is vain. Why would you want the approval of the godless? They don't know anything. And everything that they are pursuing and every path that they are down is completely worthless.
That's every one of the powerful of this age, every single one of them. Now, do you know why I know that? It's because Solomon can tell me. And Solomon went all the way. Here's where we go, and this is a tough one.
The quest for wisdom is folly. The quest for wisdom is folly. I spoke within my heart, verse 16, saying, behold, I have magnified and increased wisdom more than all who were over Jerusalem before me. I'm the wisest king ever.
Sounds like hubris unless it's true, and it was proclaimed by God to be true. My heart has seen an abundance of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and simple-minded folly.
I came to know that this also is striving after wind, because in much wisdom, there is much vexation. And whoever increases knowledge, increases pain. Solomon has striven and run and scrapped after the path of wisdom and knowledge to its bitter end as a human being.
None of us will match him. No other king in human history would have had the power, the opportunity, or the burden of wisdom the likes of which Solomon possessed. Doesn't that tell you something about Christ?
How much wisdom did Christ possess? It was not a vexation to him, because he came for a purpose. And Christ's purpose very much interacted with the world under the sun, but was very much about implementing the kingdom and the inexorable rise of the kingdom of the heavens where God sits.
Solomon draws with such clarity what Christ has accomplished. Don't miss it. Solomon knew, even in this, this is so frustrating, right? That Solomon even knew that writing to his sons here was likely vanity.
They won't listen. Solomon himself didn't listen to the law, did he? The law clearly told the kings that they must not amass wives and horses and chariots. And Solomon amassed more than any king. Even the wise are foolish.
And Solomon knew that his observations, they're futile. If you really get it, this whole book, what does Solomon say? Nothing matters. Let's be real, right? Christians, we have to grapple with that. Ecclesiastes says, nothing that you think is important is actually important.
It doesn't matter. You're not gonna get it. You're not gonna pass it to anybody else. Nobody's gonna remember. And the whole struggle is worthless. Man, that's tough, right? And what we do in our system here is that we think that the pursuit of knowledge is going to lead to the solution.
If we could only just get the right guys elected in. If we could only just solve this one little problem. If we could only make our enemies just understand that we're really not that bad. If we could do all that stuff, it would work.
And yet, over and over and over again, our attempts to do that lead to anxiety, care, doom, and unrest. And then the question Solomon, the preacher, must ask is, who can stop it? Even that quest is futile.
Even realizing that it's futile is futile. Let me ask you a series of questions here, friend. We live in the podcast age. There has never been more information available to you than right now. Can you imagine?
Let me ask you this. We seek, many of us, man, this hits me hard. We seek to learn the ins and outs of politics and news and seek for the solutions to our problem. Let me ask you, friend, does it make you more cheerful?
Are you full? Are you edified? It's great. I love political discourse. It makes me feel so joyful and hopeful about the world. We seek to learn the human condition. Why do people do what they do? How can we understand people?
Does that give you a rosy outlook on life? Does searching more and more into why humans do what they do, does that lead you to positivity and good vibes? We type into robots who have millions upon trillions upon whatever numbers after that, pieces of information, and they respond back to us within seconds to get answers to basically anything that we could ever want to know, and it brings us great joy, right?
People love AI, don't they? They love it. Build those data centers right across the street. We want them, right? We need to increase our information and our knowledge because China is, and if we don't keep up with China, what will become of us?
And Solomon says, who cares? Who cares? Let me make a bold prediction. China will be here in 100 years, and so will the United States. Will we stay static? I don't know. Empires rise and fall. He looks in, he looks in himself as he's looking into the law.
Solomon observes the wisest and the most intellectual, and he tries to gather his courtiers and everyone around him, and he tries to understand what do the smartest people think? And yet, because Solomon is the wisest that ever lived, he doesn't only look at them, he goes to the extreme other end of the spectrum, and he starts looking at people who are mentally retarded, and he's going, I wonder what their life is like.
What are they thinking? What's going on with them? And he comes back and he says, there's no solution to any of this. How do you fix the smartest people who are causing all the problems, and how do you fix the mentally retarded who don't even know about the problems?
And the answer is, maybe I would probably rather be retarded because at least then, I don't have the grievous task of all this information just weighing me down and looking up going, what is the point?
That's what Solomon is doing. There are no solutions. We are trying to grab and harness the wind, which we cannot economically accomplish with windmills to even generate electricity. Isn't that true? We put those ugly things up all over the place, and the birds get in them and they die.
We can't even harness the wind to turn a turbine. And we think that we're going to solve our political crisis by having new ideas, or if you're really sophisticated, by repurposing all the old ones. Because the best time to live ever was like 1956, right?
There was no problems back then. We had achieved it. It was done. Human civilization. And we have a huge group of people who want to go back to a time that might have been 20 years ago, it might be 60 years ago.
For some people that are really nuts, it might be like 200 years ago. If we could just get back before the Civil War, things would be great. America would be back, baby. And Solomon writes, he's like, that is so broken.
You couldn't go back and stop anything. The courses of the world will go just like the rivers going to the ocean and they never get any higher. The poor are always going to be with us. Let me give you some hard truths.
There will always be poor people under the sun. There will always be people who have cracked themselves out on drugs and are completely worthless and drags on society. There will be many people who glut and get fat and obese, and it's not the corn farmer's fault.
It's your fault for eating too much. There's going to be theft. There's going to be lies. There's going to be gossip. There's going to be people who speak filthy language. And then there's going to be some that have simple faith, and they are despised in the evangelical institution today, and even more in the Catholic institution.
Simple faith, what? You don't want to know all the systematic theology out there? Are you even a Christian, bro? No, I think there's some of the best of us, and I think Solomon would look at that and he would go, there's some that are simple-minded.
They are not vexed, but I am. And there are going to be many today who love the Lord and who fight in their way. More wisdom simply leads us to more understanding of unsolvable problems. You may know more factors that lead to the problems that we have, but you still can't solve them.
More knowledge increases our pain because we see more and more unalleviated suffering and sin. What has the internet really done, if not alert us to the great hopelessness of the world? Do you think that you were meant to know about somebody who got choked out in Minneapolis in the summer?
Some run-of-the-mill gangster who gets choked out and it causes riots across the whole United States just because people knew about it? Just think about how crazy that is. Increasing knowledge leads to more pain.
So what do we do? It's a trap, isn't it? This whole pursuit of knowledge and wisdom is a trap of unbalanced Christianity and unbalanced philosophy. Because on one end, going down this path, it causes paralyzing anxiety and weakness.
It's all done. I guess I just can't do anything. What's it matter if I do anything? That's one side. And see, the philosopher, he wrongly believes that if we can empirically arrive at universal maxims, that we can begin solving all these problems from knowing the big answers.
The philosopher's goal is to strive to answer the big questions in a way that no one can contradict him, and then we're probably there. We will be as God, knowing what he knows. This has gone on fruitlessly for the entirety of the human existence.
Are we any closer to having answers to the great questions today? Let me ask you, straight up, are we closer? If I went to the philosophy department at the University of Arkansas, and I said, why are we all here?
Would I get the same answer from even the people there? How long have we been doing this? The greatest philosophers could not even protect their own kings and empires from what was coming for them. There's a guy named Machiavelli, and he was instructing the princes on how to keep their empire in place.
He was ruthless, but many things he said were very much true. Are the Italians in command today? His philosophy was vain, gone, because what happens to the philosopher is this. The simple-minded madman, the barbarian, he just kills the philosopher and doesn't care about him anymore.
Isn't it true? That's what happens. You get overrun with academics, and here comes the barbarian horde to kill all your academics who do not know how to defend themselves. The barbarian doesn't care about your words.
That's what Solomon sees over and over again, but let's bring it closer to home. The unbalanced Christian believes that if we achieve doctrinal fidelity, that we will be a pure church who is able to win the world with the gospel.
If only, if only we can get our doctrine so locked in. Here's the thing, right? If we are 100 right about every single thing, then we'll be pure, and we will reach the world. Do you see the problem?
You've made yourself an island in the pursuit. You have cut off the hands and feet and any ability to reach anyone in the world, because if they're not 100 there, they're 0 there in that economy, and there's nothing to do.
And it also is so snobbish, is it not? It's so ridiculous, because we look back to the New Testament. Who was leading these churches? John, Paul, Timothy, James, Titus, Epaphras, Barnabas. Any of you guys want to match horns with them?
Do I think I'm a better elder than Paul? No one would think that, and yet what happened? The apostolic churches were overrun with heretics. They were overrun with people who were fooling and gaining sway during the very life of these great apostles.
The harvest of the church ebbs and flows with God's purposes as he appoints vessels of wrath alongside vessels of mercy, and reminds the wise that salvation belongs utterly and completely to himself. God is very much not dependent on my ministry or yours.
And I'm going to say something to my shame. It is a great temptation to strive after the wind. The Sunday after July 4th, I come in and look around, and we're low on attendance, and I was disturbed in my soul.
I kid you not, I thought, we're going to die. It's all over. Isn't it a temptation to strive after the wind? Isn't it a temptation to number things and to measure things the way we see them and not the way God sees them?
Everyone that comes to me that kind of knows about the church and knows about me, the first question they always ask, they don't say, they say, how's the church going? And what they mean by that is, how many people are there?
That's the only way we even know how to measure churches in our modernist age. Is your church successful? Means how many people? It's striving after the wind. Is it not? And that's how we measure. And then we wonder.
Friends, I don't think I'm saying anything new when we look over the broad church landscape. Let me just give, let me give some credence to what I'm saying. We have completely lost the biggest, the most powerful tenets of the Protestant faith in America.
The Methodists are gone. They're reforming. The remnant is reforming. Presbyterians in the United States are gone. The Episcopalians are gone. The Lutherans are like 95 gone. The Baptists are flailing around with strobe lights and fighting with each other schismatically.
The Catholics, man, who knows it, like, those guys are nuts, right? Eastern Orthodox, who can even understand it? And we sit and we wonder, why is this happening? And I would tell you, without guile, it's all in Ecclesiastes.
When you start to chase after the wind, don't be surprised when you don't catch anything. When you start to seek that which is futile, don't be surprised when it feels like your whole life is futile. If you place your treasures on the earth, don't be surprised when the rust gets them, when the moth eats them.
And then even more powerfully, I think, when you wake up every morning and you just don't feel content. You're just not there. If my ministry and what I do in this place and what Corey does and what our church officers here do, if it's all based on numbers-based results, we're not gonna make it.
I can just tell you, whether we have 70 people or whether we have 10 ,000 people, we're not gonna make it. And I think it's more common to see the people not make it with 10 ,000. It's much harder to be an elder over a church that has 10 ,000 people and stay with fidelity to what God has called you to do than it is when you have 50 souls who you know well.
It is an affliction as an elder to have that many souls because it's so futile, is it not? How can you do it? How can you be accountable for their blood? And I ask the question, and I don't throw darts, but I will say those brothers need grace and they need focus because chasing after the wind is seductive.
Because even though we know that the wind is without substance, we can still go outside and see the mist, can't we? And we can see the wind blowing the trees. And do you know what we can't see? God. There's one time that we were to see God and that is when the word of God was made manifest and men saw him and his name was Jesus Christ.
The question has to be asked after a sermon like this. What do we do? What do we do? And I could tell you in cheek and say, it doesn't matter. But we know it does, right? We know it does because should we do this?
Should we just pack it up and quit because it's all vain and we're just wind chasing for no gain? No, because the balanced Christian understands this. You have to understand a couple of things. We know that salvation is the Lord's.
We also know that we are his slaves. Do you know what a good slave does? Quite simply, he does what he's told, right? A good slave does what he's told. And it was beautiful this morning. Brady was talking about reading through Exodus with his family and he reminded me of something.
It's one of my favorite parts of the law of God is how the slave, he was freed but he wanted to stay with his master. He could take an awl, which those of you who don't do woodworking, it's like a spike, and he would punch it through his ear.
And that meant, I'm your slave for life. And all of the apostles in the New Testament, they write, even Jesus' brothers, Jude and James, they write, I, Jude, a slave of Christ. And what that means is that they have punched their ear with the awl and they say, I'm your slave forever.
The slave loves his master's voice, especially the slave who has chosen to be there for life. He loves his master's voice. He loves to do what his master says. He loves to give his master glory and praise.
We have totally missed this in America because we have a totally wrong idea of what liberty is. Liberty is the freedom to do what you're called and supposed to do. It's liberty under the law. It's not liberty to do anything you want.
It's liberty to follow God's law. It's liberty to be good. Goodness matters. We don't save anyone. And yet, scripture says, how will they hear if we don't preach? We don't give them salvation but we do give them the words to hear.
So what are we to do? We are to grow in and seek wisdom without worshiping wisdom. And this can be difficult. Always has been difficult. We are to obey God's commands out of love and gratitude. Not so that we can decrease our pain and not so that we can master the world.
But that doesn't mean that we withdraw ourselves from the world. We are not the people that go, well, it's all done. I'm not gonna invest in anything. That is dumb too. We are also told in scripture that we are to provide inheritance, that we are to care about our sons who are coming, that we are to care about generational righteousness even though we can't achieve it.
Does that make sense? That's why it's wind. If you think that you're gonna get it, you're not. You can't achieve it. But he can. And he has made promises. And we hear the master's voice. And we love. So we build not because we wanna grasp wisdom and glory for ourselves, but we build because God blesses generationally.
We don't wanna present our towers and testaments to our own fortitude like the fools building the Tower of Babel. We don't build things so we can show our might. We build because the master told us to.
And it brings him glory. You know why we fight for the church? I don't think we do this enough, even internally. We have to fight for the church. Why? Because the church is Christ's bride, and he is our master.
And the bride is the most important thing to the groom. Is that not so? Men, men, is there anything, anything that could stir you to violence faster than a threat against your wife? I think the few times in my life that I've been just blackout furious have been when there have been attacks against my wife.
I could kill somebody for that. How do we think Jesus takes it when we attack his bride, especially from within? We must have a care, friends. It looks like it's really bad right now. It does, for all the reasons I just told you.
It looks like it's very bad, and yet, do you not understand that even that realization is vain? Because the state of the church right now has been preordained by God before he created anything, and the church is exactly where he wants it right now.
And the reason that it is where he wants it right now is because it's gonna give him maximum glory. There are times of growth, and there are times of purging, and in all of those times, Christ is glorified.
We can't lose. We can't. It's not possible. And we do all of this stuff, all of this, listening to the master's voice, following after him. We do that knowing something. Did you know this? It's going to increase your pain and your vexation under the sun.
Jesus said, if they hated me, they will hate you also. And this is what that very much means. As you listen to the voice of the master and you do what you were told to do, you will increase in wisdom because when you ask it of him, he will give it to you because you're not gonna doubt because you've been given faith.
We don't doubt the promises of God in total because we've been given faith. It's impossible for us to live lives doubting God's promises because he has saved us and he has given us his Holy Spirit and he directs our paths and he pulls us and he leads us.
And so you can't lose because he is in you and he is greater than the world. And at the end of the day, what's going to happen is under the sun, you're gonna be pained and you're gonna be vexed and you're gonna be frustrated and you're gonna cry out to God and God is going to comfort you with his comforter and he's gonna tell you, my friend, my son, you are right where I want you to be.
There are men in that city and I want them. Go get them. We will never escape our humanity under the sun. But friends, as we take communion, I want you to think of this. Our ultimate destiny is not under the sun.
And we live here because there are treasures that can be stored up here. That is not a pietist closet Bible study with yourself. Tyler said, I think very brilliantly a couple of weeks ago, the fruit of the Christian life results in people.
Who cares how patient you are if it doesn't apply to people and grow their lives and grow their fruitfulness? And that is how the church grows. By the power of the Holy Spirit, not in a woo woo ethereal way.
It grows through the power of the Holy Spirit as God's people obey his law. And proclaim his gospel. And I think that's an encouraging thought. God's done this. Walk in it, brother. Walk in it, sister.
And remember there's pain. Solomon had it and you will too. And probably to a much lesser degree than him. Let's pray. Lord, thank you so much for this book. There are a few pieces of scripture that I have read in the last years that have struck me as being so penetratingly true as this book.
And yet, Lord, as you have afflicted us with this condition of seeking to know and gain wisdom all the while being further and further away from it, the more we know, the further we are from knowing it all.
Lord, even in that, you have given us your son in whom every question, he is the yes. What is the meaning of life? Christ and him crucified. Lord, help the fools in the week here at CBC to be filled with your Holy Spirit.
To walk with a slack leash behind him. And Lord, that there would be much fruit in this place. And that as we are vexed and as we are pained, Lord, that that pain and that vexation would not lead to despair, but instead would lead to perseverance.
That it would lead to a stronger trust and an unassailable belief in your promises. Or that we would be steadfast, measured for our faithfulness, not measured for our own ingenuity and our own efforts.
Lord, protect us here from the wiles of the enemy and the temptations of our flesh that would seek to measure your bride according to human standards. But Lord, you have cleaned your own bride. You have redeemed her.
Who are we to claim any part of ownership? Lord, protect us from that vanity, protect us from that arrogance, from that sinful pride. And Lord, help us to love your bride, even as we love you. It's in your name I pray these things, amen.