Turn in our Bibles to Ecclesiastes chapter 11. Our text this morning is Ecclesiastes 11.7 through 12.8. Ecclesiastes 11.7 through 12.8. Light is sweet and it is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun. So if a person lives many years, let him rejoice in them all, but let him remember that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is vanity. Remember, oh young man, in your youth and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes, but know that for all these things, God will bring you into judgment. remove vexation from your heart and put away pain from your body for youth and the dawn of life are vanity. Remember also your creator in the days of your youth before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, I have no pleasure in them. Before the sun and the light and the moon and the stars are darkened and the clouds return after the rain and the day when the keepers of the house tremble and the strong men are bent, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those who look through the windows are dimmed, and the doors on the street are shut when the sound of the grinding is low, and one rises up at the sound of a bird, and all the daughters of song are brought low. They are afraid also of what is high, and terrors are in the way. The almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags itself along, and desire fails, because man is going to his eternal home, and the mourners go about the streets. Before the silver cord is snapped, or the golden bowl is broken, or the pitcher is shattered at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, and the dust returns to the earth as it was. and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the preacher. All is vanity. Let's pray together. Father, we ask that what we know not, you would teach us. That what we have not, you would give us. And that what we are not, you would make us. We ask it in Jesus' name, amen. I think one of the things that is missing in large part in our culture is what the Bible prescribes in the Old and New Testament, which is that the older generation should teach the younger generation, that there should be a relationship between the generations of respect and mutual encouragement and that the young people should be willing to humble themselves, to listen to the wisdom of the old, the elderly, the experienced, as it were, and that the older generation should be willing to share. that knowledge and experience with the younger generation. And I think it would be wrong to say that either side is totally to blame for the breakdown that often happens between generations. Sometimes older folks keep to themselves and don't want to be bothered with the young folks. I pray that's not you. It hasn't proven to be true. But sometimes you meet people like that, right? And often the brush that is painted over the older folks is that they're a little temperamental. They're a little grumpy. Maybe they get that reputation falsely, but still that sometimes is the reputation. And of course we can lay plenty of blame on the younger people, probably more so than the older folks, because the young people are the ones meant to be reaching out to the older ones, right? It's supposed to work both ways, but so many young people don't want to listen to the older generation because they think they're irrelevant. They think, what in the world do we have in common? What can you teach me? What wisdom can you provide me? I've been blessed to have some great relationships with older men in my years who have instructed me and encouraged me and rebuked me when I needed to be. You can learn so much, not just by them telling you what the lessons are, but by telling you the stories of how they learned their lessons. And I have proposed from the beginning of our study of the book of Ecclesiastes, that Solomon is old in his age, looking back on his life, on his observations and his experiences. And he's giving us his version of wisdom from his perspective. Sometimes it is bleak. Sometimes it is a little depressing. Sometimes he's pessimistic, but he's always honest. It's a little gritty. but he's always honest. And that's what the generations need from each other. And perhaps most particularly in this passage, it seems Solomon is writing his book for the young. He's writing this book as an instructional help for those who are still young in their years, because he addresses these instructions primarily to the youth. And he has, I think, three basic instructions in this passage, and those are the three headings I have for you, if you wanna follow along and take notes. He instructs us to rejoice, to remove, and to remember. I love when alliteration happens so naturally, I didn't have to work at it. It was just right here in the text. Three R's, rejoice, remove, and remember. So those are the headings we'll hang our hat on as we move here. First, Solomon is instructing us to rejoice. He begins in verse seven by saying that light is sweet. It is pleasant for the eyes to see the sun. So Solomon throughout the course of Ecclesiastes has made some proclamations about life under the sun is so dark and bleak, it's better to not have been born. But in the last several chapters, he has proven to come down on the side of, it's better to be alive than to be dead. And he enforces that again here. Life is good. Life is good. It's pleasant to have life under the sun. to be able to see the sun. And he uses this little line, light is sweet, which I particularly like, because he's mixing his metaphors there, isn't he? He's using light, which is something that we see, right? It's a difference, it's a sense of sight, but then he's saying it's sweet, which is a sense of taste. So he's mixing his metaphors to try and impress upon us the sweetness and the brightness that life can bring. Not so bad for a pessimist like Solomon, right? Life is good. If a person gets many years, he should rejoice in them all. He should rejoice in them all, he continues in verse eight. So life is good. It's sweet. Enjoy it. Sounds like good advice. Let's end there, amen. He goes on though, he doesn't just say this as an observation, but a command. He actually commands us to rejoice in verse nine, by simply saying rejoice. Not it would be good if you rejoiced, or it's preferable if you rejoice, but you should rejoice. Rejoice young man in your youth, let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart, and the sight of your eyes." Now we have to think carefully about what Solomon is saying when he says, walk in the ways of your heart, the desires of your heart and the sight of your eyes, because we could interpret this passage to be saying something that it's not. We could be interpreting this verse to say, life is good, you should enjoy it whatever way you think is fit. So if you wanna, work yourself to death and have a lot of money, great, go do that. That's what gives you fulfillment. If you wanna just pursue the pleasures of this world, go for it. I don't think that's what Solomon is saying here for a few reasons. One, the broad teaching of scripture clearly does not line up with that interpretation. Nowhere do we see in the Old Testament or the New anyone of any merit, certainly not Jesus saying, hey, just go live it up. That's not what he's saying here. It's also contrary to what Solomon has already said. He's already pointed out throughout the book that pleasure and sex and money and food and all that stuff that we can enjoy rightly is not the end all be all. We can't live our lives in pursuit of those things. The third reason is he tempers what he's teaching in this very verse. He says, but know that for all these things, God will bring you into judgment. In other words, he's saying, whatever you do decide to do in this life, however you decide to enjoy it, you will be judged. You will be judged. So if you go the path of frivolity and entertainment and sex and money, you will be judged and you will be punished is the implication. However, if you choose the path of wisdom and righteousness, then you also be judged. And the implication then is you would be rewarded as the Old Testament clearly teaches and the new for that matter. So it's not a license for us to just do as we please, but it is a license for us to rejoice in our daily tasks. This is a more broad way of Solomon's encouragement to us that has come up again and again in the book to eat, drink, and enjoy your toil. This is him saying in all of life, and the daily moments from when you're young, rejoice, rejoice, cherish it, live in that moment. I thought of the example of the young parents who are going through the various stages of their child's life. And when they're waking up at 3 a.m. and feeding their baby and changing its diapers and all those things, it is, Maddening, right? It's mind numbing how tired you can become, I'm sure. And you find yourself thinking, oh, I just want this phase to be over. But if you're around the right people, you will have some wise, kindly older ladies say, enjoy it. It'll be over soon and you'll miss it. Don't take it for granted. Then when their child becomes a toddler, scooting around the house, causing mischief, The parents become a different kind of tired, a different kind of pulling hair out. And while they have their sweet moments, they are often just hoping, oh, will they please start school? I want them out of here. And if you're around the right grandmas, they will tell you, enjoy it. Live in this moment because it won't last. It's fleeting. You will be looking back and thinking, I missed it. I didn't enjoy it like I should have. Then when they're finally in school and they've got all their activities and sports and all the hustle and bustle that comes with getting your kids everywhere they need to go in their elementary school and junior high years, it's another level. It's another kind of You're just tunnel vision, getting through it. And everybody understands that, right? Everybody did it that way too, right? Everyone that tells you that good advice of enjoy it had to be told that same advice by someone else. But eventually that child moves out, starts their own family, and you see them less and less and less. And you're happy, you're glad, you've done the job that you were tasked to do. but you're also sad. You're also, I miss those days. Part of the reason we miss them is because we didn't enjoy them while we had them. And Solomon is saying, don't do that. Rejoice in the time that you have with your family, with your, in your daily routines and tasks, take joy in it. Rejoice responsibly. Don't go over the edge. Don't make gods or idols out of these things, but let them be sources of hope and life and joy to you. Rejoice. The second thing though is remove, remove. And he gives us two things to remove. Verse 10, remove vexation from your heart and put away or remove pain from your body. For youth and the dawn of life are vanity. Now you've probably said this or thought it or had it said to you, youth is wasted on the young, right? Youth is wasted on the young. Or you've maybe said to a younger person, oh, don't get old. It's miserable. Think more about that in a moment. But what Solomon I think is trying to prescribe here is, He wants you to care for your heart, your soul, and he wants you to care for your body. Start as a young person caring for those things. Don't let your heart be overwhelmed or overridden by anxiety and fear and guilt and shame. cultivate your heart into a heart of joy, into a heart of confession and repentance of sin, into a heart that is tender to the word of God and not ruled by anxieties or fears, not ruled by the master of more and excess, not overwhelmed and choked out by the cares of this world. And I think very simply when he says, put away pain from your body, I think he's just telling young people to care for their bodies, be healthy, make the decisions now that will make you a healthy person in the future. And I know some of you may be sitting here thinking, I don't know how this applies to me. I'm already past the point of being young. Well, I hope you don't totally think that way. because youth is a bit it's it's not hard and fast who's young and who's not right here in this context with most of you i'm considered young i'm grateful for that but when i work at the cat shelter especially with the general staff i'm old i'm old i'm ancient to most of those girls that work there because they're all 21 and have their whole lives ahead of them in my eyes. I look at them probably similarly to how some of you look at me. Oh, what it would be like to be 21 again, right? And you look at me and think, 36, ah, he's a baby. Youth is relative. Some of you in this room are not as old as you think. Perhaps you are reaping some of what you've sown in your habits physically now, and your bodies are hurting you. That is partly natural and sometimes self-inflicted. We should be careful that even now, even if we think we're past the point of being young, it's never too late to care for ourselves, body, or our hearts. It's certainly never too late to care for our hearts. That when our hearts are full of vexation, and perhaps weighed down with false guilt and shame, perhaps overruled and overwhelmed with anxiety and fear. One of the resources we have in front of us is each other. We have the church of Jesus Christ that is here and enabled and licensed to bear the burdens of each other, to confess our sins to one another, to confess our weaknesses and our burdens and our hurts, to be held up and encouraged by those around us. And most importantly, what we have is a God who cares for us. And we can cast all of our cares on him because he cares for us. There's no question that our country, our culture has a mental health crisis upon it. And some of that we want to maybe in our, maybe we want to sort of write some of that off and think, oh, it's not what they think it is. And in large part, we'd be right. But there's a huge mental health crisis that I'm not saying it would be totally solved, but it would be greatly, greatly relieved if more people repented and believed in the Lord Jesus. Because the cause of their mental health waning and declining and causing them so much grief is because they feel uncared for and unwanted. They feel isolated and alone. Our culture has the ability to do that while making it seem like everybody's included. It has the ability to create the mirage of community and fellowship, and yet, while doing so, taking it all away from us. And so there are many, many people who are struggling with depression and anxiety and even suicidal thoughts because they think no one cares for me and I'm alone. And the gospel says, I care for you and I am with you. The third thing that Solomon encourages us, instructs us, commands us even to do is to remember. Remember specifically chapter 12, verse one, remember also your creator. Remember your creator, the one who made you, gave you life and sustains you by the word of his power. Remember him. Now again, specifically, he says, remember him in the days of your youth. And I think the importance of the emphasis on the youth and the young is that these are the type of things that if you do them when you're young, they will be habits of life and hope and joy for you when you're old. because he's warned us back in verse eight of chapter 11, that the days of darkness will be many. All that comes is vanity. And he now in chapter 12, verse one says, remember your creator before the evil days come. The dark days, the evil days that I think Solomon is saying is that process of aging. becoming, getting older and our bodies breaking down. Those are the evil days, the dark days that their end we know is that our bodies of dust will return to the dust. And he decides to picture this reality of life through this poem that scholars, no scholars agree on what exactly this poem is saying. They agree on what it means, but they don't agree on how it's saying it, I guess is maybe how I should put it. No one truly agrees on the symbolism that Solomon's trying to use, but they all agree that the poem in chapter 12, verse two through seven is telling us about the aging process and its ultimate end, death. They just disagree on what it all, how it all symbolizes it. But here's what I think makes the most sense. Verse two is picturing the coming, oncoming of a storm. That you know that you can sit out on your porch as the storm comes in, you see the clouds, how they move and the sun, how it gets covered. The lights go out, it becomes dark and the rain starts to fall. Old age has a way of having a coming effect like that, like a storm. And that once the storm settles in, he switches the metaphor or the symbolism in verse three to a house that is falling apart. So in the days when the keepers of the house tremble, I think what Solomon is trying to picture there is that your arms and your legs that once were strong and durable are now weak and wobbly, unable to do all that they used to do. The strong men are bent. As we get older, our backs tend to have more issues and we can even become bent over and we get shorter even as we get older. The grinders cease because there are few. Now our grinder would have been a female servant, a maid, who was there to grind the wheat. That's what he's saying, but I think what he's picturing is that as we get older, our teeth start to fall out. We start to lose the ability to eat with our teeth as well as we could have before. Those who look through the windows are dimmed. Now what he's picturing is that maybe the mistress of the house, the owner of the house, looking out the window at the storm coming in. But now it's dim. Her eyesight is not what it used to be. Our vision is more blurry and strained than it used to be when we were young. Verse four, the doors on the street are shut. And the sound of the grinding is low. And one rises up to the sound of a bird and all the daughters of song are brought low. I think what he's picturing there is losing our hearing. Losing our hearing. The doors are shut. It's harder for us to hear. And ironically, as we get older, even though our hearing is not as good as it once was, we still are awakened by the sound of the bird early in the morning. So we're up early with the birds. but we can't hear the song of the daughters, right? It's brought low, we can't hear it. They're afraid, excuse me, they are afraid also of what is high and terrors are in the way. This is the one that I'm really not sure what Solomon's trying to say. I don't really know what the actual one-to-one is. All I could think of was that as you get older, you're less inclined to take risks. You're less inclined certainly to take physical risks. You're less inclined to go hiking up a mountain or want to go bungee jumping or want to ride a roller coaster, right? Because you don't want to be up high. I don't want to do that now. So there's no judgment here as far as I'm concerned, but your ability or desire to take those kinds of risks and to live that kind of life on the edge, it certainly goes down as you get older. Partially, I think because of wisdom and partially because you know your body can't handle some of those things anymore. Roller coasters that you may be loved when you were a kid, now make you have a headache and your back hurt when you get off. The almond tree blossoms. When an almond tree blossoms, it is white. So he's picturing our hair turning gray. The grasshopper drags itself along and desire fails. I think he's just picturing our general weakness setting in. We used to be able to hop, skip, and jump all over the place. And now we're just dragging ourselves along at times. And I know that's comical and perhaps relatable. When he says our desire fails, I think it applies in many ways. I think generally he's saying our appetite goes down, right? Whether it be for food or many scholars connect it to sexual desire, those kinds of things wane as we get older. Because man is going to the eternal home. And what Solomon means by eternal home, I think specifically in this passage, is not heaven or hell. He's actually just picturing the grave. Because that's what he says at the end of this section here. The mourners are out in the streets. And he uses these different metaphors, pictures to depict death. The silver cord is snapped. The golden bowl is broken. The pitcher is shattered at the fountain or the wheel broken at the cistern. These are all various ways of saying life just ends. There's no, when he says the wheel is broken at the cistern, he means you can't get water anymore. And water is always a metaphor for life. There's no way to get life anymore. It's cut off. And then in verse seven, he says, the dust returns to the earth as it was. And the spirit returns to God who gave it. So the aging process, his call is to remember your creator before this happens. Because when you're in the middle of it, it can become a real struggle to remember him. I think that's what he means. He even says, these are the days where you'll say, I have no pleasure in them. I have no pleasure in them. Remember your creator. Center and build your life around him. He is the guide to how you rejoice in this life. He is the one who can remove all vexation from your heart. Remember him. And again, I just wanna say it's never too late to remember your creator. It's never too late to take stock of who you are and what you've done and how much you need him and to totally rely yourself upon him through repentance and faith. It's never too late to know and to remember. Because when the Bible says remember, it almost always means something more than just bringing it to mind. It means doing something about it. It means doing something about it. The Old Testament is full of calls for us to remember, to put the law as a front post on our heads so that we can always be thinking about his word and how to obey it. And Jesus gives us the call to remember. When he sat at the table with his disciples that night that he was betrayed, what did he tell them to do? Do it in remembrance of me. Do this in remembrance of me. He gave us this bread and this cup, signals of a new covenant, signs of what he was about to do for us. and he leaves it for us as a physical, taste-worthy, tangible means of grace to remember, to remember who Christ is, to remember his perfect life, to remember his sacrificial, willing death, to pour out his blood and for his body to be stretched out on the cross, to remember that he is risen again And then he's coming back for us. And the best news is that our salvation is not dependent on how well we remember him. Our call to remember is solid and secure, and it is a command, not just from Solomon, but from Jesus himself. but our righteousness does not depend on our remembrance. Our righteousness depends on the fact that God in his mercy remembers us. That before the foundation of the world, he had already remembered that he was going to send Jesus to die on the cross for us, for you, for me, to pay the debt that we didn't even So in his remembrance of us and our need and our frailty and that we are but dust. He shows us how wonderful he truly is, how mighty he is, how gracious and merciful he is. And he leaves us the call to now remember him. To now take these elements that we are about to take in faith, knowing that not the physical elements themselves, but the spirit in which Christ instructs us to take them are a source of hope and life and grace for our daily lives. So as we come to this table, this meal is for those of us who have repented of our sins and put our faith in Jesus, who are continuing to live a life marked by repentance. This isn't a meal for perfect people who don't sin anymore, but it is a meal for people who recognize their sin and are doing all that they can by the power of the Holy Spirit to resist, to repent, and to believe upon Jesus afresh every day. If that is you, then this meal is for you. This grace is for you. If it's not, then it's best that you let this meal pass you by and draw you to God for repentance and faith. That if this meal brings up those questions of, am I really, or should I really? Trust in Jesus as your savior, and then this meal is for you. But if you are repenting and believing in him, then this meal is for you. Steven, Jim, would you come now? They will pass out the bread for us. And when they are finished, we will take that bread together.