Three readings from God's Word this morning. The first from the Old Testament, which is also our sermon text. We're going through the book of Ecclesiastes this morning. It brings us to chapter 4. Solomon speaking again, Again, I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them. On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun. Then I saw that all toil and all skill and work come from a man's envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind. The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh. Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind. Again, I saw vanity under the sun, one person who has no other, either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil and his eyes are never satisfied with riches so that he never asks, for whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure? This also is vanity and an unhappy business. Two are better than one because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken. Better was a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who no longer knew how to take advice. For he went from prison to the throne, though in his own kingdom he had been born poor. I saw all the living who move about under the sun, along with that youth who was to stand in the king's place. There was no end of all the people, all of whom he led. Yet those who come later will not rejoice in him. Surely this also is vanity and a striving after wind." The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Our New Testament reading comes from Galatians chapter 5, verses 1 through 15. Paul's writing. For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Look, I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law. You have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion is not from him who calls you. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. I have confidence in the Lord that you will take no other view than mine, and the one who is troubling you will bear the penalty, whoever he is. But if I, brothers, still preach circumcision, why am I still being persecuted?" In that case, the offense of the cross has been removed. I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves. For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. And finally, our gospel reading comes from Mark 12, 28 to 34. And one of the scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, asked him, which commandment is the most important of all? Jesus answered, the most important is, hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. And the scribe said to him, you are right, teacher. You have truly said that he is one and there is no other besides him. And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength and to love one's neighbor as oneself is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God. And after that, no one dared to ask him any more questions. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. And again, on Thanksgiving weekend, we always have a number of people who are traveling away and then traveling here to be with us. Some of you are some faces that I've recognized from holidays in the past as you've come to be with family. Others, this may be your first time. We welcome you all. This is our public service of worship, and it is open to all. All men are called to give God praise and honor and to hear His voice in the Holy Scriptures. Today we are preaching from Ecclesiastes chapter 4. You have that printed in your bulletin. If you don't have a Bible, you can follow along with that. And if you don't have a Bible at all and you need one, please let us know. We'd be happy to get you one. So Ecclesiastes 4. Of course, we're continuing on in our series on Ecclesiastes. We started with chapter 1, verse 1, and we'll work our way through to the end of the book. And so we've learned something already. Solomon isn't just starting here, but we have already learned something about wisdom by Solomon, calls himself the Koholeth. in the Book of Ecclesiastes, he's kind of stepping out of his kingly role, later on viewing himself as a wise man who is looking back on his life, a life that has been filled with foolishness and ruin, and although great material success, and he's reflecting on it and using his role not as a king issuing orders, but as a teacher, one who gathers people together to instruct them. Solomon's prescription for wisdom has been thus far that we would enjoy what we have been given. We've been given simple joys as food in our work, and God has given them to us as a gift. When we understand this and we receive these things as gifts from God, we delight in them. Even if they're not in the traditional categories of things that we delight in, We often think that we should delight in food if it is of the best quality, expertly prepared, the drink's the best quality, and the work is the dream job you've always been hoping for. But Solomon says, no, it's actually the simple pleasures. The secret here is not in working until you get the very best and then delight in that, but delight in whatever you have, whatever it might be. Nonetheless, those things will still leave us a little bit empty. I like to cook. And I thought I'd make a nice dinner one night, but I was cooking for one that night. I was finishing seminaries in the last few months, and after that I'd be moving to Tacoma for my first pastoral position there. Now, Aria was 30-something weeks pregnant at the time with Wren, and so she had to fly out first because after basically it came down to this, either you're going to deliver this baby in Florida or you're going to deliver this baby in Washington. And our health insurance and our future life was all waiting for us in Washington, my new job. So she had to leave six weeks early because there's a cutoff. You can't fly if they think you're going to maybe deliver in the middle of the flight. And so she arrived on the West Coast before my graduation. She had to miss graduation, but it was worth it because we got Wren, safe and sound. So easy decision there. But I had to stay in Florida and finish up with my degree until I could join them out West. And so I was alone. Like I said, I like to cook, so I figured, I'll make a nice dinner. I think I barbecued steak that night. And you know, if you could make a nice dinner, it takes an hour and a half or so, and do the shopping, get stuff, nice dinner. And I sat down to eat this nice dinner, and I realized, this is just terrible. I'm sitting here eating this nice dinner, and I'm all alone. Who really cares? I don't care. I think from then on out, I just ate, well, I started eating sandwiches, and then I declined to scrambled eggs, and then I declined to cold ravioli, and I just became more disheveled and depressed like a strange hermit until I got to see my family again. People are calling Aria like, have you seen, have you talked to Jared? I'm a little worried about him. I'm like, what? I've got my tuna. Leave me alone. It's a dark time. Now, I'm not claiming that I was mature in my thinking. I should have really received whatever I had as a gift of God, even the cold ravioli. And looking back, I would counsel myself to look to the promises of God in a better way than I did and to reach out to my community. We had a wonderful church there. I should have done better. Eating alone, which eating itself is a basic joy as Solomon has taught us, but eating alone tends to make it less satisfying. because eating is something that is meant to be shared. Now you might think that this is a text before us about friendship. I think that we could make the case for seeing friendship in this text, but there's a particular focus within this text on an element that is always found in deep friendships. It is the element that separates a casual friendship from a deep one, and that is the element of service. The elements of service. To be a friend, a true friend to someone is to serve them and to be served by them. There is a mutual lifting up, a bearing of the burdens that each has with the other. it's important to recognize you can serve people that you are not friends with. A fireman or a mailman offers a public service. That doesn't mean that they're your friend. I've been served and helped by people that I don't know. And you can have friendship without service. There's a common interest. You've got your hunting friends or your hiking friends or your friend who works in the supermarket. When we say this, we understand that we have a We're bound together by hunting, and if they stopped hunting, we probably wouldn't hang out together. Sometimes those do transition into a real friendship. The real fellowship, the stuff of depth, always involves serving one another. We sacrifice for one another. We give of our resources and our time and our energy. Work friendships, if you have those, they stop usually when you stop working there. Your baseball friends, well, you do baseball together, but that's about it. And how do you know when a friendship has transitioned from a mutual interest friendship to real fellowship? When you are serving one another. How do we know the fellowship in the Book of Acts was real? Because they sold their property and took care of one another with it. So we will be focused on service this morning, not to the exclusion of friendship, but service as the driving force behind true fellowship. I think we could all say that real friendship means love. And Paul says the essence of love in Galatians, he said, serve one another for you shall love your neighbor as yourself. So service this morning. What Solomon does is he takes us through two failures of service and then what he's doing is he brings us to a crisis. And then he shows us the great joy of serving one another. And finally he shows us that as a wise man making us wise, service is a very good thing, but it's not everything and it has its limits under the sun. This phrase, under the sun, which you'll encounter here, by the way, refers not to, it is a phrase meant to exclude eternal realities. When Solomon is talking about life under the sun, he means what we deal with here on earth, not in light of eternity. So let's start right away. The first thing the great king is going to do is to break our hearts, and he's going to show us the oppression of the world. Now, he's not strictly logical here. A geometry professor would first establish that our hearts should care about the oppressed and those who are suffering, but he doesn't. He simply assumes that you're a human being, that you have a heart, and when you see people cry, it makes you sad. He's assuming that you're not a sociopath, that you actually care about other people. And of course, wisdom literature, the genre of literature that we're preaching from today, is here to engage with your mind to help you understand the way that things are. Wisdom literature always assumes a lot of things. It assumes the rest of the scriptures. It assumes that you are the person that you are. It assumes that it knows you to some degree. You are supposed to be able to deduce that if you don't care about the oppressed, you certainly should. This is not argued, it is simply assumed. Solomon laments that he saw instances of oppression done on the earth and though the victims shed tears, there was no one to comfort them. The word, the Hebrew word here for oppression is used only two other times in the Old Testament. There are some other words in Hebrew that are also translated oppressed. So if you look up that word in English, you'll find many hits. But these two other instances in Hebrew, one is in Isaiah, the other in Amos, the two groups of people being oppressed are the poor and then virgin daughters, in other words, young girls. So the concept of oppression always involves powerful people taking advantage of weak people. The source of the word itself has to do with a burden. Oppression is to overburden someone. Someone is oppressed when they're given more than they're able to handle or more than they're able to carry. It'd be like if my son was very gracious, we had a 50-pound bag of dog food. So we had to carry this into the house and he's like, I'll help you out, dad. So he grabs his arms around and he did his very best. It wasn't going anywhere because he's 50 pounds. The bag was also 50 pounds. He was overburdened. And so a very easy example of this in Washington State we mail in our ballots. In most places around the country you have to actually go to a polling place but in some places notably the deep south and Texas people need to travel fairly long distances to polling places even if there in urban areas. A study done by MIT showed that African Americans have to stand in line for twice as long as whites in order to vote. Texas, the state of Texas shut down 403 polling stations between 2012 and 2016. A disproportionate number of those were in black communities. So what does that do? That makes it harder for some people to vote. They have longer distances, longer lines, particularly in communities where people may have a harder time getting the time off. That's just a small instance of political oppression, and I'm sure that there's a debate there to be had. That's an example of the concept. It would be easy to regale you with stories of abuse that hurt the weak, little children, the elderly, the poor, the unborn, the foreign. all the ways that these people suffer at the hands of others. Some of these evils are so horrible they must come directly from Satan himself. I think that there will be another time for these accounts But suffice to say, people with power and strength often use that strength to abuse and to hurt and to take from those who can't defend themselves. And I think that if you're old enough to know what I'm talking about, then that will suffice. But I don't feel like dragging your children through the mud on this. The Bible never tries to put a happy Pollyanna sheen on life. Solomon's holy words here presented before us are so honest, and this is something you wouldn't really expect in the Bible, to be honest. Show this to an unbeliever if they doubt the Bible. He says it would be better for some people to have never been born. It is bleak, but this is true. This is not an argument for abortion. It's no excuse to murder someone. Solomon simply means that under the sun, in the world in which we live, excluding the heavens, some people would be better off just never to have existed in the first place. In a fallen world, injustice and oppression hurt us. They're supposed to hurt us, but they don't surprise us, and much of it is far beyond our control. The real failure of service is when there is no one to comfort those who are oppressed. It is certainly an abuse of those who have the power, who are not using their power to serve those who are weaker than them. But the real tragedy here is that there is no one to comfort those who are oppressed and suffering. This is a failure of service because it is exponentially worse to have to suffer alone. There's an emptiness among a people who are not committed to helping one another to bear one another's burdens and serve one another in love. That is true in a society, that is true in a church, that's true in a family. When that commitment is not there, everything is hollow and empty. This implies, by the by, that if you are someone who is suffering or struggling, I think the exhortation here is to be open enough with others so that your suffering can be known and you can receive comfort. You shouldn't be one of those people who's got the big facades up. Everything is always fine with us, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 and one quarter because there's a leap year. Maybe you take the quarter out so one day every four years you can actually have a bad day. There's no room for facades. In fact, when you have a facade up, when you don't allow others to see your difficulty, you deny them the blessing of serving you. Those who have strength, whether it's strength of political power or financial ability or simply strength of encouragement. You're feeling good and someone else is not. Your opportunity is to draw near them in comfort and care. Jesus is always our example and our King in this regard. In Matthew 26, we read this just a couple of weeks ago, the Lord said to His disciples, Now, in Matthew 26, Jesus is praying alone. He's not even asking them to come with me and pray with me. He just wanted them there. He just wanted them to be with Him, to know that He had people who were supporting Him and who wouldn't let Him down. They all fell asleep, of course. But I want you to consider that the Lord Jesus Christ, without sin, said, my struggles are so heavy here, I can't bear them. Would you just be with me? Would you just be near to me while I go and pray? Because I can't do it on my own. He did, in fact, do it on His own because they all fell asleep, but He wanted them. But where the disciples failed the Lord, the Lord does not fail us. We will suffer hurt and oppression even in this world. Many may lack the comfort of companionship and service under the sun. But in John 14, a couple other places in John in particular, Jesus speaks about the ministry of the Holy Spirit who is sent to us as our comforter, as our comforter. He is there to serve us. Jesus is present with us in whatever sufferings and difficulty we endure, we have to endure. He doesn't abandon us, even if it feels like If it seems like to our hearts, I don't know if He's hearing my prayer. If you have faith in Christ, He is hearing your prayer because He doesn't make His Holy Spirit optional. It's not like plan C. If you really need the help, I'll give you the Spirit. He gives you the Spirit and that's how you believed in the first place. How do you know you have the Spirit? Because you believe in Jesus. That's how you know. How do you know the Spirit is a resource for you? Because you believe in Jesus, and He will not abandon you. If you have the Spirit, you have the Lord Jesus Himself. You have the Father, because God is one. Solomon laments the oppression under the Son, which is a failure of service. But we are never separated from the Son, because of the Son. Because He became our servant, so we never suffer alone. Let's look at the second failure of service. They're two, really, but they're both connected to work, so I'm going to treat them as one. Look at verses 4 through 6. Solomon has placed a high premium on the value of work already. He's done this previously, saying that we should rejoice in our toil. But he shows us here that all work does not necessarily come from a heart of service. There's a work that is born out of envy. Envy is a form of hatred for our neighbor, verse 4. It's a way of hating your neighbor. And envy is one way, a very prominent way, that people are driven to overwork, to working too much. I find it very interesting that Solomon, writing in the ancient world where people's livelihood, where their ability to eat came from the work of their hands, is actually warning people against working too much. This is no surprise. The people of God are people of Sabbath. We are people who trust God so much that one day out of seven, we release our hands. The rest of the world, the pagan world, they've got to grind away seven days a week, day after day after day, grinding, hoping to get enough, hoping to get ahead, hoping to meet their goals. And they never meet their goals unless they have low goals. But believe it or not, when you get to know people, they still have goals that they can't reach. God calls His people to open our hands and release them from work one day out of seven. And so God's people have always known that there is such a thing as working too much. What happens? What's the result of overwork? It is vanity, Solomon says, which you may recall means it is temporary and it is, in some sense, mysterious. It is unknowable. What's that mean? Well, it means that, sure, you worked more, and so you got more, and it was temporary. And under the sun, you had it, and then you died. And then it went to some fool somewhere. You had it, and in the end, you say, why did I work so hard? Why did I do this? Under the sun, it makes no sense. The work done in envy produces no eternal good. It's just striving after the wind. Next time a breeze comes along, go out and grab some of it. Put it in your pocket. You can't do it, of course. Striving after wind. It's impossible. You can't achieve the goal of envy-driven work because accomplishments never defeat envy. See, the real problem is not the accomplishment or the lack thereof. The real problem is envy in the heart. And when envy conquers one target, it just sets sight on another one. Occasionally, someone does actually achieve the pinnacle. You think about the Olympic gymnasts that for that brief window of time between, you know, ages like 14 and 8 or, you know, 11 if you're Chinese, I guess, that little window of time in which those gymnasts are at the top of their ability. Somebody wins the all-around gold every four years in the Olympics. They are the best gymnast in the world for two weeks and then somebody else is nipping their heels. They never repeat, right? It's not like, oh, yeah, this has been a dominant, dominant gymnast here for the last 20 years. She wins the gold every time. It doesn't work like that. What happens is they get to that pinnacle and they realize this is it. I've worked my whole life for this. And then they despair and the train wrecks of lives are manifold. They just crash and burn because they don't know what to do. driven to destroy their neighbor and competitor instead of love them, love Him. They can't enjoy time with family or friends. They might go to a Saturday night church so they can work on Sunday, or they don't take a day off of work, just a half day. You know, I got the service in Sunday morning, then off to work Sunday evening, as if the Lord's Day and a worship service are the same thing, it's a day. And then at the same time, there's also the other side of that coin, but it's the same coin, a folding of hands. As he says, the fool eats his own flesh. Why? Because he's so lazy, he can't get up and get food for himself. There's no food available, just himself. So he reaches down and takes a bite out of his flabby tummy. He doesn't do this literally, of course, kids. It's just an image, right? It means He produces nothing, and so in the end, there's nothing that He can offer to anyone. There is no one that He can serve. All He does is consume. And so Solomon gives us a much better option here in verse 6, where we go here. Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after the wind. In other words, don't work too much. To work with two hands, to hold on to this, to try to grab the wind, which is an impossible task with two hands, is too much. That's done out of envy and pride and it doesn't work. But don't fold your hands and sit back and lollygag around either. Solomon says, be wise. You see what wisdom literature is doing? You see what this is moving you to? He doesn't define this. He doesn't say, work 43 and a half hours a day. That would be foolish to try to prescribe that. Some of you have jobs in which you have to work more than that. Some of you are in situations or seasons of life. I was talking to somebody last week who works in construction. At a certain point in the construction of a major skyrise, they've got to spend tons and tons of hours pouring the slab because it's all time sensitive. If you don't get it at the right time, The concrete settles wrong. Stuff doesn't work out. So you have to put a lot of hours in. And then later on, be wise. There's a time to rest from that over time. In whatever that looks like for you, your labor is to be moderated. The purpose of work is to be of service to others, to allow you to serve others. If we work too much, we might provide money for others. But your personal presence, which is also a service to other people, I want you to think about that. Your presence with others is a service and a blessing to them. If you work too much, you're not there to be with them. You can't be with your family or with friends. You don't have time to entertain surprise guests or to be of service to them. The world is a hard and lonely place and you've cut yourself off from that. So don't take yourself out of companionship and service to others because you have too much work and you just provide a paycheck for the family. And also don't work so little that you have nothing to offer. Your work should allow you to be a service and should itself be a service. Any lawful calling, no matter where you work, if it's lawful, it is serving others in some way. It provides a good to others, your clients, your customers, your employer, those who benefit from your work, your family, your friends, your church, other organizations that you might give money or time to. He extends this point in verses 7 and 8 revealing the utter irony and the uselessness of somebody who works with all their energy and has no one to benefit from their work. They're never satisfied with what they have and so they never stop to ask about relationships. They deprive themselves of the simple pleasures of enjoyment and company and food, the enjoyment of their work even, just to make more and they never even realize that they are alone in their accomplishments. How sad is this? In the end they say, They're never satisfied with their riches, right? Nobody ever says, I made enough money. That'll be fine. We don't need to open any more Starbucks. We are making money hand over foot. But in the end, what does he say? Solomon is saying this out of his experience because he tried this. Remember, for whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure? This also is vanity and an unhappy business. Again, Jesus is our model and our savior in this. His task on earth was not to be served, but to serve. And there was no lack of need, right? Jesus lived in the ancient world. Everybody is dying of some parasite or illness. They've got diseases that we treat with an aspirin, and they couldn't do anything about it. A quick trip to the doctor takes care of it, and they are dying. And yet, Jesus, with all the ability to heal, often withdrew from people. They were ignorant and they needed instructions. The teaching that they received had been so corrupted by the Pharisees. It had been so wrongly taught that Jesus could say to them, your teaching is so wrong, you don't even believe in Moses. You don't, don't listen to the Pharisees. They don't believe what Moses taught. And yet he took time away. Despite that great need, he removed himself to spend time with his father. As a matter of fact, when work schedules get busy, spiritual practices, prayer, reading the Bible, I'm not guilt tripping you. I'm saying these are the first things to go. Jesus worked hard. He had long, exhausting days. But in his perfect wisdom, he knew when it was time to stop working, to cease his work, and though he was immensely popular, the need was great, he would still withdraw." Do you see yourself here? Do you provide good to others through your work? Kids, you probably have some chores to do at home. Are you doing... Now, let me say, most of you kids are probably not having a problem with doing too much work. It is possible. It is possible in fact for parents to overburden your children and not let them actually be children. Children play. It's possible to overburden your children as well. Often though, I would say that's a rare case. Is your work limited to one hand? If you have to, You know, and this, again, this is an issue of wisdom. If you're having to grab onto your work with two hands, is that a temporary season? Sometimes it's going to happen. Listen, if you're a firefighter and there's a five alarm blaze, you know, you got to go. You know, well, it's been 40 hours this week. I'm going to take a nap. You go and you do what needs to be done. But if there's a five alarm blaze every other day, you probably ought to reassess your priorities. on board a small boat at sea, let's say the ship gets one hand, the boat gets one hand, or the sea takes both. You always have to be holding on to something on the boat, otherwise you'll get rocked off and the sea gets both of your hands. Are both hands full of toil or are your hands folded? Has leisure taken over your life? In this day and age, this is, I think, the greatest bear trap set out for young men. It's the bear trap that threatens to bite on the leg. It's the bear trap of video games, endless Netflix, internet surfing, hanging out with friends with movies and whatnot. Obviously, all of those things in moderation, I think, are okay. I hope I don't misspeak there, but I think that all of those with moderation are fine. But it's not hard to find young men who have wasted their lives and given up on actual productive work so that they can play World of Warcraft or whatever video game is out there. If you're wise, you'll figure moderation in your work and rest. And you don't go about these things alone. Verses 9 through 12 speak to this. So take a look here. This is the benefit of service. We certainly read a real friendship here. But most importantly, what we see that to serve others is what really makes a friendship. Solomon looks at service in work, in setbacks, in circumstances, and in opposition. I'll be real brief here. Anyone who's tried to move a bureau on your own knows that having a companion does more than cut your workload in half. Trying to move a big chest of drawers up the stairs on your own is a very hard task, and you've maybe got to jerry-rig it up with, you know, ropes and pulleys and the whole deal. But when we serve one another in labor, two have a better reward for their toil than one. You would never trust a moving company if just one guy showed up. You need somebody to hold the other end of the bureau. And then verse 10, as we face setbacks, having someone to help us. is a service to us. You know, basketball players in the NBA do this a lot. They get knocked down through some play, and then they kind of lay there with their hands up, and they'll just wait there until a teammate comes by. You know, sometimes you just seem like everybody, the play's started, and they're still going like this. When finally they're like, all right, I'll get up on my own. But for some reason, they love to wait there until a teammate comes by and helps them back on their feet. I'm sure it's because they want to embody the book of Ecclesiastes. And of course the setbacks that we face can be financial, they can be personal, in family troubles or relational difficulties, they can be medical. Any bad thing creates an opportunity for someone to serve you. Even if it's simply to be like Job's friends before they open their big traps, simply to be present with someone, simply to be present with someone. Sometimes there's nothing wise that can be said. And one of the nice traditions we have in America and many other countries too is there's a wake when someone dies. You go and there's no particular agenda. It's not the funeral. People are just together and they eat and they remember. Just together. Verse 11 is distinguished a bit from verse 10 I think. We don't always fall, sometimes we have setbacks, but those things are, they tend to be out of the ordinary, hopefully they are in any case, but the temperature of a cold night is just a regular unexpected circumstance. Two huddled together can stay warm. There's many accounts of soldiers on battlefields in the cold battlefields of Europe in World War II, and the men would huddle together in their foxholes so that they didn't freeze to death. Huddled together, two can stay warm. Well, the regular turns and difficulties of life are survived because others are there, and they help us endure the cold nights. When one person falls, they fall alone, but we all suffer the cold together. Living in a fallen world brings some of the same difficulties on all of us, and so by being present with one another and serving one another, we endure those difficulties. And there are times that sometimes we actually face adversaries. People come at us in some sort of attack. Rarely, but possibly a physical attack, but more often an attack on your character or your work or your reputation. In all of this, there are opportunities to serve and to be served. And of course, it is Jesus who truly serves us in all of this. He grants us the benefits of His labor for us as He imputes His righteousness to us. 1 Corinthians 15 says that we are always abounding in the work of the Lord. knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. By His grace, He makes our labor worthwhile. He keeps us from falling as we are upheld by His grace. Peter says in 2 Peter 1, to supplement faith with virtue and knowledge and self-control and brotherly affection and love and so on. And if we do so, we will be kept from being ineffective or unfruitful. And we are told that if we practice these qualities, you will never fall. The Bible over and over again tells us how much we need one another so that we continue in brotherly affection and love. You can't continue in brotherly affection if you have no brothers with whom to be affectionate. All of these are gifts of the Spirit. And when we are opposed by the adversary, Jesus draws near to us. James writes in James 4, resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Because the Lord has come to serve us and though the devil would prevail against us if we were alone, with the Lord we are able to withstand him. A threefold cord is not easily broken. And so our lives ought to reflect this. people of service, standing by our brothers and sisters, willing to lend a hand, willing to speak a word of encouragement, willing simply to be with them, and opening our lives such that they will be near to us in our times of difficulty. There's nothing worse than finding out someone has been suffering, dealing with terrible news from their family or health or friends or whatever it might be for the last two years. and they've just been suffering alone. This should not be. But there is a limitation to this. Verses 13 through the end. It's better, as it was, you'll recall from earlier on in Solomon's writings here, it's better to be wise than foolish. But even wisdom has its limits. Well, so too, the wisdom that we have garnered from Solomon and his teaching about the openness and the service of our lives It's good knowledge, but it has its limits. It's better to be a poor and wise youth than an old and foolish king who no longer knew how to take advice. But in the end, it's all forgotten. Those who come later don't rejoice in the one who has done so much good. And so there are limits under the sun, but there are no limits above the sun. What the Lord Jesus Himself does is He makes everything beautiful in its time. In fact, Paul tells the Corinthians that if their work is done for the Lord, it will stand. Yes, under the sun, the work that you do will be forgotten. Do you remember who your great-great-great-great-grandfather was? Of course you don't. You don't remember any of them and neither do I. Maybe you've got a book of genealogy somewhere, but you don't know who they were and mostly you don't care. And four or five generations from now, nobody will care who you are or were or what you did. But do you know who the greatest Christian saint ever was? Me neither. If such a thing could be measured by the Lord, one day we might find out that it was in fact the Apostle Paul or Peter or John. But the people who will be celebrated in the kingdom that is to come are people whose names you have never heard and that have been forgotten to history. They are Christians who were fed to the lions, and they went in with praises on their lips, refusing to compromise on their confession of faith. We have no record of their names, and yet they are remembered and celebrated in heaven forever. They are the people who serve faithfully in humble ways. I expect that a great many preachers will be surprised to find out that others are lauded before them because for all of their great public works, there were works that were done in greater faith, although they were never seen by any other man. Your work and your service for the Lord is never in vain. And so take heart. serve others and be served by others. Most of all, be honest before the Lord so that he might serve you with his grace and forgiveness. Amen. Please join me in prayer. Our Lord Jesus Christ, thank you for serving us. Strengthen us that we might be of service and be a blessing to others. We desire to be like you and to serve. And so we commit ourselves to this, but we commit ourselves most of all to believing in your promises, to believing in your character and your work accomplished for us. We commit ourselves to this and we pray our Lord Jesus in your holy name. Amen.