Please remain standing for our Old Testament lesson this morning, which is also our sermon text, Ecclesiastes chapter 1, the first 11 verses. The words of the preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, says the preacher. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. What is man gained by all the toil at which he toils under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north, around and around goes the wind, and on its circuits the wind returns. All streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full. To the place where the streams flow, there they flow again. All things are full of weariness. A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, see, this is new? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to be among those who come after." The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Please join me in prayer. Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we open our text today, and it is, as is the whole book of Ecclesiastes, unusual to us in many ways. We ask, Lord, that you would instruct us, that you would give us hearts of wisdom, teach us to number our days, and make us wise and effective, knowing that our time is short, and that it would be put to the utmost use in your service. in rest, in work, in industry, and in relaxation, all to you, our God and Father. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Please be seated. The poorest nation on earth is the Democratic Republic of Congo. The average income of a citizen of Congo is less than $400 annually. That figure is, by the way, adjusted for purchasing power. So things are obviously cheaper there than they are here, but this accounts for that. It is the same as if I gave you $400 and said, there you go, that's what you have until a year from now. In contrast, Qatar, sometimes called Qatar, Q-A-T-E-R, is the wealthiest country on earth. The average citizen has an income of over $100,000, again adjusted for purchasing power. A Qatari earns more, on average, in two days than a Congolese man or woman, two days. Can you imagine the vast disparity in the lives of two people, one from each nation. One has access to luxury that is literally unknown to the other. Have you ever had that experience where you just kind of say to yourself, I didn't know there was something this nice that actually existed? I've had that a couple times in someone's car or actually borrowing a bicycle and it's just like, I didn't know there was such a thing as a bicycle that was this nice. King Solomon is like a Qatari king and he is surrounded by Congolese citizens. all in the same nation. Solomon has the very best of everything. His wealth was wealth that even today we would have a hard time imagining, never mind his contemporaries. He enjoyed unlimited access to everything that the world at his time had to offer, food, clothing, architecture, comfort, companionship. Nothing could be denied to King Solomon. If his wealth couldn't buy it, his power could secure it. He could have anything he wanted, except for time. The sun rises on the rich and the poor at the exact same moment. It sets at the same time for everyone. You can perhaps buy a longer life, but you don't know how long that long life is going to be. You could work out every day and have all the best medicines and food and nutritional supplements and still get hit by a truck. The days may seem like the eternal light of mid-July or the sunless, rainy days of January, but all of us live on the same earth and it spins on its axis through the universe once every 24 hours, man, woman, and child alike. So what good does it do you if you can stretch out your life for a few more days with better health care, eating or exercise? You're still going to die. One out of one people die. The ultimate statistic. Odds are 100%. So it's no wonder that Solomon, of all people, is looking for meaning in all of this. For all of his wealth, for all of his wisdom, he still had 24 hours every day, and no more than that, the same as you have now. And he still had it for 100 years or less. What does a man gain from all his work at which he toils under the sun? Verse 3. This phrase is important. It shows us what Solomon is really trying to deal with. He is not really trying to figure out the mysteries of eternal life. He's trying to figure out life under the sun, a phrase that means this world, the life in which we now live between the cradle and the grave. What is the point of this life here? Now it's an important question. And not just because this life is the one in which we're living, it's where we hang out and drink coffee as living people. You might be wondering, if we're going to live forever as resurrected beings in the new heavens and new earth, what is the point of trying to figure out life here? But this is never the approach that scripture takes about this life. The world to come is not a world that should be forgotten, and it is of greater value than this world now. There's no question about that. But we should never think that that renders this life and this world meaningless. It is in this world that the Lord Jesus was incarnate of the Virgin. It was in this world that man was created. It was in this world that salvation was planned and prepared. In this world in which we now live, that the Lord Jesus Christ gave Himself as the great sacrifice of all of history. So we should never think of ourselves as people who are just passing through this world on our way to heaven. This world is important enough that God the Father did not send His Son the eternity of time to be sacrificed for us. He sent him onto our planet, into our world, in the fullness of time, that same time in which we live. Jesus was crucified under the sun. So we're going to see that contrary to what you often hear about the book of Ecclesiastes, life under the sun is not meaningless, nor is it atheistic as is often taught by Ecclesiastes. This life is given, it is endued with a particular beauty and meaning if you can get to it. And Solomon is going to help us to get there. If you were not here last week, I would really encourage you to listen to last week's sermon online to catch up as we go through Ecclesiastes as an introduction to the book, especially important because Ecclesiastes is the black sheep of the Bible, unlike anything else in terms of literature within the Word of God. So there's three things that we're going to learn about life, or be reminded of anyway. We're going to learn to spend well this temporary life, to embrace the repetition of life and to appreciate the beauty of the mystery of life. I want you to remember, in particular, that the vanity here, vanity of vanities, does not mean meaningless. It means temporary. It means it's there and gone, like smoke. And it also indicates a sort of mystery, a sense that we don't fully understand or grasp, nor will we ever. Now, this is a Christian church. What does the gospel of Jesus Christ have to do with our message today? I have a large reference book at home. It records every single quotation or allusion or even what they call echoes, any hint that the New Testament uses from the Old Testament. It's a very thick book. Isaiah is referred to, directly or indirectly, 93 times. Genesis, 18 times. Ecclesiastes, zero. Not once. So what does this have to do with the Gospel? Well, there's two things. As you saw in our liturgy today, you'll note that there is a temporariness that even the New Testament picks up on. What Solomon is looking at in our lives, the New Testament, applies to not just your life, but the entirety of life under the sun from now until the return of Christ. History has an end just like your life has an end. What the New Testament does is it takes this concept and simply expands it and applies it not to you individually, as Solomon is doing, but to humanity. And the second is that Ecclesiastes is a book by a king meditating on the nature of things. He's pondering. He can only do that, and it's poignant to us that it is Solomon who is doing the writing here because Israel as a nation was only unified and at peace under Solomon. For a brief time under Rehoboam, Solomon's son, but it divided under Rehoboam, only Solomon had the entirety of his kingship, a unified nation, and a nation at peace. David did all the fighting for him. And so now Solomon is able to write poetry about the nature of marriage and intimate love in Song of Solomon. He's able to compose proverbs as he did in that book, he's able to consider the meaning of life because he's not out on the battlefield, because he's not at war. So what does this tell us about the gospel of Jesus Christ? If you are at war and enmity with God through your sin, you have neither the time nor the luxury of pondering this life. Your life is a harrowing experience. and you're moving from one death trap to another only to be caught by wrath in the end. But, having been set free from that war by the Lord Jesus Christ, having your sins forgiven, you are now at peace with God. And if you are at peace with God, brothers and sisters, you have no other enemies who can truly assail you. And so then, you can sit and you can ponder, and you can think. Don't miss it. We have a lot of free time in the Western world. It is a luxury that so many throughout world history have not known, scraping merely for their survival from dawn until dusk, hoping and praying that invaders don't come and take it all away, living in security, allows us the free time to ponder, to write, to think, to compose poetry, and peace by the blood of Jesus Christ allows us to ponder before God without fear. This sermon should last another 20 or 30 minutes. I will try not to waste your time because you won't get that time back ever. You spend it and it's gone. Let's consider two men from our two countries, Qatar and Congo. The Qatari man wakes up early in the morning. He's got meetings all day. He works for a bank and helps to handle the high volume of money that moves through his country's economy every day as a manager. He has many responsibilities, but he is well rewarded for his efforts. Two of his three children have woken up, and they see him through bleary eyes as he leaves for work. His wife has made him breakfast, and he's off for the day. He'll have lunch with some new employees, and then he'll work again until late in the evening, having a little time with his oldest child as the youngest two have gone to sleep already by the time he gets home. This schedule continues six and sometimes seven days a week. He has one day off usually, plus holidays. And he takes a week of vacation every year with his family in an exotic and luxurious location. They look forward to it all year. The man in the Congo wakes up and makes his way to see if there's work at the construction site today. There is, but just for six hours. So he puts in his time from the early morning until just afternoon and then goes home. As he's leaving, his son runs down to give him a late lunch, some fried taro root. They walk home together and his father shares a few bites of that lunch. At home, everyone in the family is engaged together in making dinner and cleaning their small house. A neighbor comes by, a young man who has just gotten married. He introduces his wife and they stop their work and visit for almost two hours while the children play. Later, they eat a simple dinner, and the children read to their father by lamplight. They don't want to use all of their lamp oil, so they turn out the light, and in the dark, they sing some well-loved songs together until everyone falls asleep. These are both fictional stories, of course, and as is fiction, it could be written another way, about a lazy man who has no ability to buy food or books, and a hardworking man with the money that he needs. But I offer it to you as an example of a certain kind of poverty. a poverty of time. And the difference between time poverty and money poverty is that in money we earn different amounts, but in time we are paid the same salary 24 hours every day. People with money beyond what they need for their basic necessities are able to spend their money on things that are not really necessary, but they make life valuable and interesting and more worthwhile. A dinner out, a vacation, a good book. That same concept applies to time. If you refuse to spend your time on things that are not worthwhile, you'll have more opportunity to spend your time on what is truly valuable. Solomon is pondering these things as he considers the sun's journey through the daytime sky. It arrives and later it sets, obvious enough to all, but the day that falls between those two events will never occur again. We see a river flowing past us, but it's never quite the same river. The water that you saw yesterday is now further downstream. In less than a week, it will be part of the ocean, and who knows where it will go from there. Will those drops you saw become a cloud? Will they find their way to the deepest depths of the Pacific? Will they cling to a fish as it's hauled out onto a boat? And what is the history of the water in front of you as it flows by? Was it snow? Was it rain? Was it tears dripped into the river? Wherever that water goes, before too long, it's no longer the Columbia, it's something else. Wherever the day goes, it cannot be reclaimed, or recycled, or recovered. Each particular breeze that passes through the trees makes its pass, and then that breeze is gone forever. Teachers know this better than any. My classroom of second graders in Mission Dolores Elementary are now gone, long gone, out of the second grade. They've all gone on and some of them, many of them now, have children of their own. A generation of children who came, and verse four, who will soon go back to the earth. 80 or 90 years from now, all of my former second graders will be gone. Now, I want you to remember from last week that wisdom is the art of living well. A wise man knows what to do in various situations. He knows how to remain committed to God no matter what life throws at him, and he knows when to do what. It was in Psalm 90 today, our response of reading, that we said together, so teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. This is old wisdom. This is very old wisdom. to be wise, you must know how little time you have. So consider the brevity of life as you plan your days, as you plan your life. Now it certainly doesn't mean that you ought to not work and live in poverty just so you can have time with your family. And it doesn't mean that you should only work and never see your family. It means be wise. Count the cost. There's a cost to having no income. That cost is hunger and begging. There's a cost to working too much. It's the alienation from your family. It's witnessing your children more through photographs placed on the internet than in person. It's not hard to find a career with a generous salary. You young people, you're a smart group. I'm convinced that any one of you, if you so desired, could find a career that would make you a very hefty salary if you desired to pursue that. But you must consider, it might make me financially rich, but will it make me time poor? Often those high salary positions pay so well because they require the employee to hire a personal assistant. a nanny, someone to mow their lawn and fix their car, things that they don't have time to do on their own. They have to pay for services that most other people, many other people, don't need or choose not to use. In the end, is it worth it? That's where you must be wise. There's no formula. I can't tell you that. But Solomon would have you consider the brevity of life and the brevity of the things of this life. before we become time poor. It is all temporary. So spend well the time that you have been given, or as the New Testament puts it, redeem the time for the days are evil. Enough with the worthless diversions, the lonely late nights with meaningless and stupid TV shows. If you're going to watch a movie, go watch a good movie. Or if you're going to see a bad movie, see a bad movie with friends who are worth your time. And you can all laugh at it together. I'm looking at you Pacific Rim. Of course you have to work. But find value in the work that you do. Now that doesn't mean that you have to be in a career that is your dream career. Most people throughout history have not. Many people throughout history have just been in the career that their dad was in, which is a cobbler or a farmer. And for a long time, everybody was a farmer. But find value in what you do. If you are a waitress, then serve people as serving the Lord himself. If you stock shelves for a living, that's honorable and good work. Remember that you are bringing order to chaos. You're bringing peace to people's lives. And if you don't think you are, try shopping at Kmart on December 23rd. You can't find anything. Praise the Lord for stock clerks. If you're in a position where you have to change your own oil because you can't afford to pay someone to do it, that's fine. Enjoy what you're doing. Appreciate the genius of this machine, where you can let the oil drip out and fill it up again, making it continue to serve you for another 3,000 miles. Value it. Appreciate what you're doing. You have only 24 hours today and every day. Spend it well, because your opportunity to spend it is limited. And of course, one of the great challenges to the idea of spending time well is the challenge of the repetition of it all. Monday, I'm doing a load of laundry because I am making what is soiled into something that is clean and useful. I'm taking what is disordered and turning it into something that is neat and folded and accessible so that my children can put on clean clothes. Tuesday, I'm doing a load of laundry again, just like yesterday. Wednesday, the three-year-old went through four outfits yesterday and the dog slept in the clean clothes, leaving all the mud and dog hair. I am doing a load of laundry again. Thursday, I forgot the clothes in the laundry. Now they smell like mildew, so I have to wash the same load. Again, if I have to run these same clothes through the laundry one more time, I'm going to scream. Friday, It's so cute when the baby climbs into a load of fresh, warm laundry. It's less cute when her diaper is saggy, and then she has a life-altering blowout while in the laundry. I thought that I would scream, but I'm just sobbing in the corner. Solomon knew this as well. Each sunset is unique, but the sun sets every day. The wind blows and dies down, and soon it will blow again, never ceasing, never stopping. At the end of a blustery day, you know the winds will someday return. And while every moment the river is filled with new and different water, tomorrow it will be filled again with new water, and after that, filled with more water, again and again and again, over and over. You wash the dishes, and the dishes must be washed again. You have to buy a new vacuum cleaner because you have to vacuum every day and you just wore the old one out. And as much as you might appreciate being able to admire the genius of those who created this engine, it seemed like it wasn't long ago that I was changing the oil and now I got to get under this stupid car again and change it. We do not manage tediousness very well. We quickly tire of what is not new. Look at the excitement that becomes a part of your life when something new comes into it. You commute to work in the morning, and it may be kind of a fun drive when you get a new car. But eventually, it's the same old traffic jams, the same old traffic. Novelty wears off, and we can hear the Koholeth whispering in our ears, there's nothing new under the sun. There have been new cars before, new inventions, and new things. In fact, verse 11, the only way we get a sense of things being new is if we forget what has happened before, which we inevitably do. Remember, a Model T, a Model T Ford, was once cutting-edge technology. But this is not how it ought to be. I want you to notice that Solomon started by considering what man gains by his toil. Again, verse 3. Setting his mind to this task, to understanding this mystery, what did he do? He considered creation. The sun, the air, and the sea. All things easily identified in the Bible as the work of God. Remember, wisdom literature doesn't seek to tell us everything. It assumes that we already have knowledge of what has come before. So as Solomon is writing this, he assumes that we are familiar with the God who created the earth. The wind has always been attributed to God. We see this in Psalm 147, 18. He makes his wind blow and the waters flow. There's rivers also. The Red Sea, we read in Exodus 14, 21, was pushed back by the east wind, which obviously the Lord sent. All of these things are the work of God. And of course, the sun was day four of creation, the sea on day two of creation. So as Solomon is trying to consider the value of work, he says, if I want to know what my work and toil is worth, I should look to God, who also works and toils. God's work continues in a pattern, always the same and yet always unique. God gives us the sunrise, and He gives us a sunrise every day, day after day, each one unique and beautiful in its own way. And yet, predictably, the sun will come up tomorrow. It was G.K. Chesterton who wrote in his book, Orthodoxy, because children have a bounding vitality They are in spirit fierce and free. Therefore, they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, do it again. And the grown-up person does it again until he's nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, do it again to the sun. And every evening, do it again to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike. It may be that God makes every daisy separately, but He has never got tired of making them. This is what Solomon sees as well. Ever-changing, ever-new, and ever-repetitive. And this is key. We find all of these things to be some of the most beautiful things that we ever see. Look at verse 8. Even though they are repetitive and sunsets happen every day, we never get tired of seeing them. We never don't like the sound of the wind in the trees. People build their houses on riverbanks so they can take in the sight of the river. You might think, listen, you saw the river. Why do you want a house by it so you can look at it all the time? Why would you want an oceanfront home? It's just the ocean. You've seen it before. You know what waves sound like. Why do you want to hear it again and again and again? Aren't we tired of monotony? But you're not. If you've been to the ocean, you want to go again. You long to hear the sound of the waves crashing onto the beach. And you know that there's nothing more disappointing than the Gulf Coast of Florida that has no waves to speak of. You see, what Solomon is telling us is not that life is unbearably repetitive and has no meaning, but that it is temporary. It is completely repetitive, for the moment quite predictable, and yet mysteriously has tremendous meaning and beauty to all of us. Consider the angels around the throne of God in Revelation 4. Day and night they never ceased to say, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come. Sinless creatures offering perfect worship to God, unstained by any sin. You have never given God worship that is so pure and unstained as those angels do day and night forever and ever. And their worship repeats itself again and again and again. The world is made liturgically. You know, sometimes we say every church has liturgy, but what we mean by that is everybody worships in some way. But as we commonly use the term, a so-called liturgical church is a church in which you know what's going to happen next. You look in the bulletin and you say, ah, I see we're going to sing the Gloria Patri. I've sung that before. I know what to expect. Now the angels around the throne of God, they don't get bored or weary of worshiping God with those same words repeated over and over and over like a sunrise, like a river moving. In fact, those things Despite our hunger for something new, what you have probably found is that those things with which we are familiar become a secure and a beautiful place. Think about the traditions that I'm guessing your family has around Christmas or Thanksgiving. Those traditions that you practice as an adult that you also had as a child, They bring your heart to rest. There's a confidence and a security there. They become home. In seminary, I had classes with a man who worked in a nursing home or had worked in a nursing home. And of the patients that he worked with, some of them had minds that had simply been ravaged by Alzheimer's and dementia. They had forgotten familiar faces and names from their lives. They forgot their family members. But he said they still remembered the Lord's Prayer, and they still sang the hymns that they sung as a child. Why? Because liturgy. Because those old souls now near the grave grew up in places where they said the Lord's Prayer every week, and it became a part of their soul. People sometimes ask if we have children's church, you know, a place during the worship service where the children can go. I say, well, I think we have the best children's church you could ever come and bring your children to. In our children's church, our children learn the patterns of worship, of adoration of God, confessing sin, of hearing His Word, of entering to worship with reverence and awe, of coming to the Lord's table, of praying together with the people of Christ. And they say, oh, wow, that sounds amazing. What is it? Just say it's worship. The same worship you're going to be in. The same worship that forms my soul. I wouldn't dare offer my children anything less. You may have noticed that we said the Apostles' Creed last week and also this week. Does it make it less meaningful because we said it two weeks in a row? To the contrary. I would suggest if it seems less meaningful, probably the fault is not with the Apostle's Creed, but in your own heart, and in my own heart, in my desire for something new. I'm convinced that we could spend our whole lives confessing the Apostle's Creed and never get down to the bottom of it. So yes, our worship repeats itself. Sometimes I think it ought to repeat itself more than it does, not less. And yet, mysteriously, it is always beautiful and always new. Last week's praise is gone and gone forever. We couldn't just do our worship service ten times in a row and say, see you in three months. Every Sunday, it's new. Every morning, His mercies are new for you. Tomorrow, I hope you will have time to read the Bible. It's the same Bible you've always read. We haven't added a word to the 66 chapters that you grew up with. 1,000... I'm sorry, 66 books. Don't write that down. 1,189 chapters. The same chapters that have been there and will always be there. If we get tired of it, it's certainly not the Bible that is losing its meaning. Our modern world is obsessed with innovation. Apple shaves two millimeters off the edge of their latest iPhone and everybody loses their minds. It feels so much better in the hand. What remains at the end is not innovation. Because all innovation is really just imitation. You think we've made it new? We've got a new technology. We've had new technologies before. And predictably, every few years, we come up with a new technology, just like we always have. Yes, we've had the wheel for a while now, but at one point, Adam or Kane or somebody said, hey, let's drill a hole in the middle of this round thing. New technology. There's always new things. But that's not what remains at the end. What remains is the wind moving through the boughs of a fir tree, the river ever moving to the sea, the sun rising and setting in unspeakable beauty again and again, and our worship, a pattern of grace, a pattern of holiness, a pattern of love to God and love to one another that abides forever. Amen. Please join me in prayer. Our Lord Jesus Christ, we worship and honor you and this worship that we give you today is so like the worship that we have given you in previous Sundays, and that your church has given you on Sundays since your resurrection, and so like the worship that the people of God have always given to their God throughout all time from the seventh day of creation. And yet it is new. And today, here and now, in your presence, before your face, we give you worship and praise and honor and glory. Teach us, our Lord and God, to be patient people. Teach us to find beauty in that which we can predict and that which we know is coming. Teach us to use our time well. We thank You that You have made us all so rich with these 24 hours. And in fact, whether waking or even asleep, You work on us and You change us even in those sleeping hours. And so, let us live all of our days and all of our hours to You and to Your glory. If we sleep, let us sleep resting confident in Your fatherly care. If we work, let us work as unto You, serving You with everything that we do. As we rest, let us rest in joy knowing that You are our Father, and that You sustain us, that You uphold the world by the power of Your Word, and we do not. We thank You, our Lord. Thank You for making us so rich in time. Help us to spend it well. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.