So Ecclesiastes 5, we're gonna be reading the first seven verses. And if you've been following along as we've been going through Ecclesiastes, this passage seems like a little breath of fresh air over what we've been reading. So let's read together, follow along. I'll read verses one through seven. Walk prudently when you go to the house of God. and draw near to hear rather than to give the sacrifice of fools. For they do not know that they do evil. Do not be rash with your mouth and let not your heart utter anything hastily before God. For God is in heaven and you on earth. Therefore, let your words be few. For a dream comes through much activity, and a fool's voice is known by his many words. When you make a vow to God, do not delay to pay it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you have vowed. Better not to vow, than to vow and not pay. Do not let your mouth cause your flesh to sin, nor say before the messenger of God that it was an error. Why should God be angry at your excuse and destroy the work of your hands? For in the multitude of dreams and many words, there is also vanity, but fear God. Let's bow our heads for prayer. Oh, Lord, we approach you today through our great high priest, Jesus Christ, the righteous one. Our only hope in life and death, Lord, is this good news of the gospel. That while we are sinful and cut off from you through our own multitude of sins, Jesus has made a new and living way. A way that is perfect. As the perfect son of God is laid down his life for our sins. So that all who come to you in Christ come righteous, not because we are righteous, but because you have made us so. We come with boldness, Lord, not because we have the right to on our own, but you have given us this right in Christ. Lord, we come with confidence, even though our sins should make us fear, you have given us forgiveness and access so that now we may come together and worship you joyfully. Come together to hear your word, to sing your praises. Lord, and we come because of Jesus. What you have done for us in giving your son who willingly laid down his life to pay for the sins of all those who repent and believe the gospel. What an awesome privilege it is today, Lord, to come to your presence. We pray, God, we pray for your help. Help us to focus our minds on you. Even as we read your word and we listen to this message, Lord, we want to hear you. We want to listen to you. We don't want this hour to pass with us just going through the motions of coming to this building and singing and hearing and talking and leaving. Lord, we want, Lord, to hear from you. We want to worship you. We want to offer our praise to you. We want to be encouraged by one another and help one another. And God, we ask your help with these things. Lord, we pray as well for our kids that are upstairs that today as they hear a lesson from your word, they'd be confronted with the reality of who you are. And Lord, you might use that lesson to impact their lives. Oh God, we pray for those who are suffering and hurting today. We beg you Lord to pour out your grace and mercy to them. Those that are gathered here with us and those who are unable to be Lord, we pray that you might help them. Lord, we thank you that we are not alone in our worship of you today, but there are multitudes of Christians in this region and in our country and around the world who are gathering with the same purpose. And God, we pray your blessing, not only on our gathering, but all those that proclaim the gospel in truth Lord, that you might bless them as they seek to know you and worship you. Well, Lord, we pray now for this message specifically, that you might help us to be attentive to the wisdom that's found in these first verses of chapter five. Teach us, Lord, how to approach you, how to please you. We pray it in Jesus' name, amen. Amen, you can be seated. Well, so far in Ecclesiastes, Solomon has taken us on a tour, observing a lot of different things. He's gone to the courtrooms, and he has observed injustice there. And we can say with Solomon, yeah, we see the same thing. What you saw back in your day, we see in our day. He's gone to the marketplace, he's gone out on the highways, and his conclusion as he looks around is vanity. There is all sorts of temporary, meaningless, fleeting things going on. He struggles to find purpose in what he sees around him. The injustices are hard to bear, hard to endure. He also goes to the places of pleasure, and he pursues pleasure, and he finds there emptiness, vanity. And some of us can identify with those same struggles where we have also pursued meaning and purpose and joy in the pleasures of this world and found out it's not where it's at. There's emptiness and vanity and so far in Ecclesiastes, I think we as church people, we can point to the things Solomon has mentioned and say, yeah, yeah, those folks out there trying to party it up to find meaning and joy and lasting hope, nope, they're not gonna do it. Those that are trying to solve all the problems of the world to get happy, well, they're never gonna be happy, that's not gonna work. The attention is focused on other places and other people. We might even find it easy to point at others and say, yeah, you guys got it all wrong. You're not gonna find what you're looking for. Because we know that there is more than what we can see, right? Well, we know that even as we looked at the last few weeks, a lot of injustice. It may look like evil is triumphing and good is going unrewarded or perhaps even punished. And yet we know there's more than what we can see. Because God is a righteous judge and he's over all things. And just what we see here is not all there is to see. And we rejoice in that. Solomon turns his attention now to the temple. The temple of Solomon was glorious. It was gold. It was one of the wonders of the ancient world. It's an amazing scene. If you would just picture in your mind the most beautiful, magnificent structure you could imagine, you'd be close maybe to what Solomon's temple was like. And that's where Solomon turns his observations now. He's done looking at all the things going on in the world outside, the people who disregard God, who leave God out, and he is looking at the people that come to worship. Now, the house of God referenced in verse number one is that temple. It's the temple of the Old Testament. This building today, sometimes we might call it the house of God. We might call this the place where we come to worship God. But the truth is this building does not house God any more than any other building houses God. The Old Testament temple was special because God's presence dwelt there. But the reality is God is everywhere. He's omnipresent. There's nowhere he's not. So to come into this place, what makes this place a holy place? It's not the building itself. In fact, I joke sometimes that if you didn't see the church sign outside, you could drive by and think this was a dentist's office on the corner. You don't drive up to the building and say, wow, what an awe-inspiring steeple, what an amazing architecture, this is a holy place. And the truth is, even if we had an amazing steeple and some awe-inspiring architecture, it would not turn this building into a holy place. What's holy about here is who is here. This is God's people gathering to worship God. That's what makes this place a special place. So it's different than the temple of the Old Testament, but this place is a special place when God's people gather in it to worship him and to hear from him. Solomon turns his attention then to you and to me. It's not the Old Testament temple, I understand that, but it's the worshipers of God. It's the people who are coming to seek after God. And I trust that's you this morning, right? You're here to seek after God. So let's see as we look at Ecclesiastes five, if what Solomon saw then might not be found now. What he observed then might also be observed in our lives. I think we'll see that it's not really much different at times than what we would see coming and going into churches today. From the very first words of our text, you see that Solomon is concerned about warning us about something. He says to walk prudently. Like you need to walk carefully here. You need to walk wisely. You need to pay attention to how you walk when you go to the house of God. Now, obviously he's not just talking about putting some yellow warning on the curb so that when you walk in, you don't trip. He's talking about how you approach God. how you are in your heart as you come to God's presence. How does this connect with everything that he's told us before? Well, facing all the difficulties and confusion and perplexing things like injustice and lack of satisfaction in life, we might be tempted to come to God in the wrong way when we do come to church. And this is a temptation for all of us, right? Because you're not here seven days a week with God's people, singing his praises, hearing his word. You've got all kinds of things going on with your work, maybe, with school, with your family, with your friends. There's all sorts of things going on that some of them are just bad. I mean, that's one thing Solomon kind of points out to us, right? There's lots of unpleasant things. And we're tempted maybe to just come from all those things going on in the world around us and run into church without really thinking very much about what we're doing. Well, this passage is a warning to us. And I'm not trying to make any of you feel uncomfortable like, oh, I didn't have my devotions this morning, and then I rushed into church, and now pastor is gonna preach the entire sermon directly at me. I don't know if anybody thought that or not, but now maybe a few of you are. This is a message that we need to hear. Because this is not a message of warning to all the ones that are chasing after the pleasures of the world. Or to all the ones that are seeking power over others to find satisfaction. This is a message of warning to those who are coming to worship. So it's a message to us. There's three cautions that you need to hear from Ecclesiastes 5. so that you can properly approach God. And we are gonna look at each of these three cautions in the form of a command, what to do. It's a warning, but there's a lesson for us. If you look with me at verse number one, you'll see the first warning Solomon has for us. And I'm entitling this or stating this this way. Before you act, listen. Before you do something, stop. and pay attention. Look at verse one. Walk prudently when you go to the house of God and draw near to hear rather than to give the sacrifice of fools. Listen first, draw near to hear. What a memorable way to express the attitude we need when we come to worship God. drawn near to hear. This is contrary to much of what the world thinks about God. When do we come near to God? It's when we need to tell him something or we need to get something from him. We draw near to God when times are hard. And so we come to him not to hear what he says, but to tell him what we need. That's especially the case when we're faced with all the difficulties that are described in Ecclesiastes one through four. The kind of troubles that we face, the injustice, the evil, the emptiness, the lack of satisfaction we find. We're tempted to run to God and pour out all our complaints. But the first thing we're told to do is draw near to hear, he says, rather than to give the sacrifice of fools. In the Old Testament, if you're gonna come to the temple, you're coming with a sacrifice. You're coming with an offering of some sort. You're coming with an offering and maybe you have a need and you're bringing your offering and you're asking God to do something for you. Or you're asking or seeking forgiveness. Whatever it may be, coming to worship. And Solomon says, a sacrifice of fools. Part of this is kind of amazing to me, because we think of fools as people who don't know God. You know, Psalm 14 says, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God. We think of the foolish people as those who live life without regard to God. They don't pay attention to God. We say the fools, they're outside the place of worship, not inside the place of worship. But Solomon turns all that thinking on its head and he says, you and I that are gathered here right now, we might be the fools. He says, beware. Draw near to hear rather than to give the sacrifice of fools. Listen, we need to know God more than he needs us to tell him what we think. We need to know God more than he needs us to tell him what we think. All throughout this passage, Solomon makes this strong distinction that's gonna get clearer as we go through between God and us, right? He's in heaven, we're on earth, right? We are creatures, he is the creator. The God of heaven and earth doesn't need wisdom from us to figure out what to do. He doesn't need our direction so that he'll know how to handle a situation. And yet when we come sometimes under stress to God, we come with our instructions for God to fulfill. We come with saying, God, you need to do this, and you need to do it now, and you need to do it in this way, and this is what I'm begging you, and I'm gonna demand it from you, and I'm gonna say it loud, and often, and earnestly, and Solomon says, hold on there, be careful, because you're in danger. Instead of drawing near to God, you're in danger of acting like a fool. Before you speak, you need to hear. Before you cry out to God, telling Him what He needs to do, you need to hear what He says. We are the creators, the creatures, not the creators. In Sunday school, I said a lot of things backwards, so if I say anything like heretical and backwards, Sorry, we can straighten it out later, hopefully. The screen says before you act, listen, but it should be before you speak, listen. Before you speak, before you act in this way before God, listen. So the caution is to beware of impulsive acts of worship. When God told Moses the great commandment, the great commandment, what is the great commandment? It's to love God, right, with all our heart, with all our soul, all our mind. There is one God and we are to love Him with one devotion to Him. But the beginning of that instruction has one word. It is, hear, hear, O Israel. The Lord your God is one God. The first act that we need to master as we want to approach God is to know that we need to listen. We need to listen. Have you ever tried to do something and ignored the instructions? Maybe it was trying to put together one of those Ikea things or some other furniture that comes in a whole bunch of pieces. The bigger the piece of furniture is, the more you know you need the instructions, right? There's all kinds of parts, all kinds of pieces. You need to pay attention. But the simple parts you think you know how it works. I have through the years built many IKEA or something similar furniture that comes in a flat box and a number of times, midway through putting the thing together, I think I know what I'm doing and I just do a few steps without looking at the instructions. Occasionally, that works out. But most of the time, I end up puzzled a few more steps down the road because it's just not working like I thought. If I'm going to successfully do it, I've got to know that I need to listen. I need instruction. This is one of the hardest things for us, to recognize we need help. You say, well, we're coming to worship God. We know we need help. Well, Solomon says, be careful that when you're coming to the right place, maybe even for the right reason, that you do it the wrong way. You do it foolishly. You come telling instead of listening. You think that by doing something maybe for God that you'll get what you want. But he says, draw near to hear. How often do we take time to be just quiet before the Lord? You know, even as we come into church and we start our service, we start with some announcements, and those are practical things we need to make sure we let people know about. But then the next thing we do is we open up the word. And the goal of that is to say at the very beginning of our church gathering, we need to hear from God. We need Him to speak to us. That's why we open with the scripture. At the end of our service, we close with a benediction from scripture. Because again, we wanna emphasize what we need is we need to hear from God. Obviously in our service we enjoy singing to the Lord and praising Him, but we spend more time opening up His Word and asking Him to speak to us. All of that to emphasize we need to hear from God. I've often told our kids when they were smaller that God gave you two ears All right, you've said this before, and one mouth. And there's like a reason for that, right? You shouldn't be talking nonstop. You should be listening. How many times when our kids were small, we're trying to answer what they asked about, but they're too busy trying to talk to hear. And Solomon says, don't be foolish like that when you approach God. Before you act, listen. I mean, all through Ecclesiastes, I think you could say all through the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, God is calling us to stop and think a little bit. Pause, slow down. You know, if your days are so busy that you don't have time to pause and listen to God, you're doing it wrong. You've gotta find space to just be still. Just stop talking, stop running, stop doing everything and say, Lord, I want to hear from you. I want to draw near to hear. I read a long time ago that one of the biggest helps to approaching your personal prayer time was to begin not with prayer, but to begin with scripture. That doesn't mean you can't pray before you read the Bible, but I found this to be really helpful. So before I read the Bible, I might pray something very brief like Like Psalm 119, 18, open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. Just pray, Lord, help me to read your word today. But then as I'm reading, I'm looking for what God says about himself and what he says about me, what he might say about situations I'm facing right now. And I'm asking the Lord as I'm reading to speak to me. And then I have a whole bunch of things to pray about for my own walk with the Lord, because I've seen him in his word. I can praise him for what I saw about him today in his word. I can ask his help for what I see that I need to work on from his word today. And it gives focus to my prayers if they're guided by what I've heard first. Now, Solomon's not saying in verse 1 here, make sure to read your Bible before you pray. But he's saying your attitude of approaching God is this, before you act, before you talk, listen, before you come in with all the things you're doing, stop and hear what God is doing. The value of anything in life, Solomon has said throughout this book that the value of everything in life is vanity without God. It's fleeting. So what we need most is we need God's input. All right, how do we understand injustice? Well, we need to know God's input. How do we understand the world around us? We need to hear from God. We need to open our two ears. We need to hear what we cannot see. God is not ignoring everything going on in the world. He's not running from it. He's not ignorant of it. Psalm 51 verse six and seven. Hold on just a moment. Psalm 51, six and seven says, behold, you desire truth in the innermost being and in the hidden part, you will make me know wisdom. Purify me with hyssop and I shall be clean. Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow. So we come before God, we are sinful people and we need the cleansing and forgiveness that he can offer. At Sunday school today, we talked about the Day of Atonement. It's all about how sinful people can approach a holy God and be forgiven. It's through the sacrifice that God has required and that God has provided for us. Jesus, as we sang about earlier, our great high priest, he has come to offer the perfect sacrifice so we can approach God. One other danger we have with sacrifices, we don't come with the animals of the Old Testament, but we come with different acts of worship that we think are pleasing to God. And there's a danger that we would substitute that for actually listening to what God says. One great example of that, or tragic example of that, in 1 Samuel 15 is of King Saul. King Saul tried to cover up his disobedience of barging basically into the position of the priest and offering a sacrifice with his own pious promises. Offerings without obedience for Saul were the sacrifice of fools. You know, don't think that you can worship God rightly by not listening to what he has to say, but still giving your offering, in the offering, giving your money. Or by, you can not listen to what God says in one area, but you'll serve him in some other area, and that'll make up for it. Solomon says, hold on. That's a vain kind of empty worship. the sacrifice of fools. Notice the end of verse number one, he makes it even stronger, the warning. He says, for they do not know that they do evil. He says the person that comes like this thinks they're doing good, but they're doing evil. So the warning for us is before you act, listen. Before you speak, listen. Verses two and three, we see the next morning. So if we're to beware of impulsive worship or sacrifices here, we're to beware of impulsive prayers. And before you speak, think. Before you speak, think. The author of Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan, said this, in prayer it is better to have a heart without words than words without a heart. Look at verse two. Verse two, he says, do not be rash with your mouth and let not your heart utter anything hastily before God. Beware here of just running up and blurting out whatever comes to mind. You know, prayer is not to be a mindless thing. Our devotion to God is not something we do outside of thinking. We're to think about what we're doing. When you have an important conversation with someone, do you think about it beforehand? I know I do. Whenever I've got an important conversation, I'm nervous that I won't think of what to say or how to say it. So I try to think through in my mind what are important things that I need to say, or what might this person say, and what do I need to think about about how to respond to that? Does anybody else do that? You can like nod or wake up or anything. No, okay, great. Others of you do the same thing. So when we come to God, there's nothing wrong with having a plan about what we're going to do. In fact, Solomon here would encourage that. Say, don't just come up and always be off the cuff. Now, I'm glad, I'm glad that to come to God, we don't have to have, you know, three points and an invitation at the end in order to come and talk to him in prayer. We can talk to him throughout the day, off the cuff about whatever is going on. It's not like we have to all fold our hands just right and get down on our knees and close our eyes and be all formal about everything. Solomon's not saying you have to be super formal. He's saying you need to be thoughtful about talking to God. Beware of running into prayer without thought. I read a really helpful little book a long time ago by R.A. Torrey, a real short book that says how to pray. One of the things he recommended in that book was before you start talking to God in prayer, just pause for a moment. You know, just take a breath. You know, there's nothing like spiritual about it, but the point is, instead of rushing from whatever you were just doing right into prayer, that you take a moment, you take a deep breath, and you think about this. God is in heaven. I get to talk to him. You're approaching the holy God. Solomon says right here in verse three, for God is in heaven and you on earth. So as you're rushing to talk to God, stop and think about how amazing it is. It ought to be awe inspiring to just consider that as we lift our voice up to heaven, our voice goes further than our words will travel. That's why it really doesn't matter if you pray silently or you pray out loud. Either way, the sound waves from you are not reaching heaven. But God is greater than us, and he hears all these things. So we bow before the Lord, we offer up our prayer to him, and the God whose throne is above everything hears us. Do you consider that when you pray? If you don't, I would encourage you to try to next time before you pray, even if it's just before lunch today, and you're gonna offer up thanks, just bow your head and before you just run into praying, make sure everything's quiet and still around you. I know if you're a restaurant, you can't do that. But the people at your own table, let's be still for a moment and let's give thanks to God. And just go ahead after you're ready to pray and pause for a minute. And think about what an amazing privilege it is that we have through Christ to approach God in heaven and let your words that are gonna come out next mirror that thought, that you are a sinner who only has access to a great and holy God because of what Jesus has done for you. I think it will transform the way that you talk to God. If you will do what Solomon says here, and before you run off talking, think about what you have to say to God. Let not your heart utter anything hastily before God. God is in heaven and you on earth. Therefore, let your words be few. Now that doesn't mean that your prayer can only last 23 seconds. I think this goes right along with what Jesus warned about in the Sermon on the Mount. One of the things that he warned about with prayer is that we would pray many words thinking that God would hear us because we just repeated something over and over. He warned against vain repetitions, emptily saying the same thing over and over again, thinking that if we just beg long enough, then God will hear. Solomon says, hey, this is not some kind of thing where you have to plead with God enough for him to finally pay attention. Jesus said that's what the heathen do. Do you remember the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel? There was a challenge that Elijah issued that the prophets of Baal should build an altar and they should put the sacrifice on it and yet they shouldn't light it on fire. They should cry out to Baal and ask him to send down fire on the altar. And then Elijah was going to go after that. Elijah was gonna go and he was gonna build his altar and he was gonna pray. And the challenge was that the God who answered by fire was the real God. The prophets of Baal cry out. over and over. They cut themselves in a way to try and show their devotion and desperation to Baal. They're pleading with Baal. Elijah actually makes fun of them, that all they're doing is not gonna work. And he mocks them because they are actually not crying out to Baal, there's no Baal. There's no other God, there's one God, the true God, and so their God of their own making is not gonna answer. And so there's no fire coming down from heaven, but they're pleading over and over and over and over, and they're cutting themselves, and they're trying to do everything to get something from God, their God, Baal. And then when their turn's over, Elijah comes up, he orders lots of water to be dumped on the altar, And he prays, he prays a prayer about 60 or so words in English, in our translation, and he asks God to show himself by sending fire. And God sent fire. Solomon is saying, look, our God in heaven is not one we bargain with by demanding and pleading and just coming and saying whatever we need to say to get what we want. That's not how it works. Maybe you've done that in some other setting. You kind of tell people what they need to hear to get what you need to get. Solomon says, this is not how we approach God. Just running with all our words to get him to hear. Verse number three, if you look at it, maybe it doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you first read it. It says, for a dream comes through much activity. And a fool's voice is known by his many words. I think it's an analogy here that Solomon is presenting. He's saying if someone is a hard worker, they have deep sleep and they have many dreams, so the many dreams would indicate there's been much activity. And he's taking that thought and saying so many words is what a fool's voice is like. Many words show that a person is a fool. Have you ever heard the expression, it's better to be quiet and have people wonder if you're a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt? That's kind of what Solomon is saying with this idea that we just run before God with many words. And he says, listen, this is not how you approach God. You have to begin with the idea that you need to listen. If you're gonna approach God, you need to hear what he says. We're looking at Leviticus in Sunday school, and Nadab and Abihu are two priests who came with their unauthorized fire. They came with their own offering, their own work before God, and it was not accepted. The way for them to come was to hear what God said and to follow that. If we want to approach God, we need to hear him. We need to not be impulsive about just saying whatever we think. We need to remember that he is in heaven. He is the creator. We are the creature. He is over all things. We are not. He has the right to rule and do as he pleases. We do not. How to approach God. Before you act, listen, and before you speak, think. Now, verses four through seven give us a final warning, and it is to beware of impulsive promises. So here's the command. When you promise, act. When you promise, act. I think all of us have probably made promises to God. Verse four says, when you make a vow to God, do not delay to pay it, for he has no pleasure in fools. Once again, fools brought into the worshipers. Pay what you have vowed. Better not to vow than to vow and not pay. Now, offerings, sacrifices, were not voluntary. There were certain ones that were voluntary, but there were certain sacrifices that were required. The vows are completely voluntary. A vow, maybe the most famous vow that you would think of is the Nazirite vow. and be a vow that would involve not cutting your hair, not eating certain things, for a period of time, that you'd make this vow of the Nazirite, and that was something you would voluntarily make as a commitment before the Lord. Now, we might think of it more in the sense of this, you know, God, if you'll answer this prayer for me, then I'll do this for you. You know, God, I know I've messed up, and I'm gonna do better. And every Sunday when we gather and we hear the word, God speaks to us about different things. Last week, the sermon, there were things that God brought to my attention, where I'm like, oh, I gotta do better at that. Lord, I need to work on that. I hope you do that, right? As you hear a sermon and you hear God's truth, you're convicted of, I need to change that or I need to work on that. I need to grow in this area or I need to start doing this. And how many times at the end of the service, we bow our heads and we pray and we say something in our hearts to God about what we've just heard. and we make a little vow, Lord, I'm gonna do better at reading my Bible this week, or Lord, I'm gonna make sure I'm more faithful to church, or I've gotta try to witness to that person, or I've gotta get better control of my temper, or whatever it may be, that we make those little vows, or we stand and sing to the Lord after the sermon, and we're thinking about what we've heard, and we're thinking in our hearts about what's gonna change. So this is what the Lord is warning us about. When you promise, act. It's one thing to be disobedient to God, but it's another to promise not to be disobedient and then be disobedient. That's why he says it's better not to even vow if you're not gonna do it. Because you're adding to the sinfulness of what you're doing, if your vow is about changing from wrong to right. God did not require his people to make the vows, but he warns that we would make a vow and not make a plan to keep it, not work on it. What do we call it when someone says they're gonna do something and then they don't do it? I mean, the harshest thing we might say about it is it's a lie. Now, you said you were gonna be here and you're not here. You said you were gonna come, you didn't come. We like to have all sorts of excuses about it, right? But what this passage is saying here is God takes those very seriously. Now, I have to tell you, as I'm preparing for this sermon, this is the most convicting part of the whole passage, to think about all the little promises I've made to God. How well have I kept those? I could just raise my hand and say, not very good. I could even raise my hand and say sometimes I haven't even put a whole lot of thought into it after I've said it. Like there was really no intention to actually do it. Have you ever done that before when someone asks you to do something and you don't really want to do it, but you don't really want to deal with it right then, so you kind of act like you're going to and you vaguely intend to, so that makes you feel good about saying you will, but then you walk away and forget all about it because you really didn't intend to do it. You were just kind of saying what you needed to say at the moment and you sort of meant to do it. Have you ever made excuses like that in your heart? Maybe I'm the only one. But I've done that before. And Solomon is saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. God is in heaven. We're on earth. He hears those vows. He doesn't just have this filter on that says, well, they don't really mean it. They have good intentions. I'm sure if all the circumstances were right, they'd actually do what they said. It's going to be OK. Sometimes as parents, we do that with our kids. We give them slack on things. And we all need slack on things at times. But God is saying here, Solomon is saying, you know, this is a serious thing. I think Solomon is saying to us, we probably give ourselves too much slack when it comes to making promises to God. And that's not how we approach it. It ends up with us playing the fool. He says in verse four, God has no pleasure in fools. Pay what you have vowed. Now there's certainly sometimes when we make a promise to God and then things completely out of our control make it where we can't do it. We might say that this is just God's providence, right? We make plans and we say, if the Lord wills, we'll do this because we know that there are things outside of our control. God is in control. So I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty. I believe scripture is not trying to make us feel guilty for things like that, where God has willed something different than what we had intended to do. And so we're unable to do it. I'm not even talking about trying to do what we said and not doing it perfectly. What Solomon is talking about is flippantly making a promise with no intention of actually doing it. No follow through at all on it. Sometimes we delay to do it. Like, I'm gonna start reading my Bible more. I'm gonna start praying more. And then, you know, Monday morning is a good time, right? To start the week off reading the Bible, praying. Now, why not now? Why not today? Why not before you go and do other activities, just jump right to what you need to do? I don't mean you have to skip lunch to read your Bible today if you hadn't. But the Lord might put that on your heart that it's so urgent you need to do it before you do anything even eat lunch. That's OK. Don't delay in obedience to God. Solomon makes it clear that in the multitude of dreams there's vanity. You know, I've heard it said when it comes to planning and setting goals that having a goal without a plan is just the daydream. All right, having something you want without any plan to get there, it's just a dream. And it's fun to dream, right? It's exciting to dream about all the things that you can do, especially when you have things to do you don't want to do, right? Or that are hard. It's easy to dream about other things you could do and have all these grand visions of what you're gonna accomplish without ever taking any actual steps to accomplish any of them. It can make you feel good, but it doesn't accomplish anything. Solomon looks at the worshiper with these grand words, but no steps of action, and he sees its vanity, its emptiness. This is not the way to approach God, impulsively with worship, impulsive with our words, impulsive with our promises. Oh, Solomon gives the answer to us in the very end of verse seven. Not having a religion that is just words, but he says in the end of verse seven, but fear God. I skipped over verse six, but he's basically saying here, God doesn't want to hear the excuses of why you didn't do it. The answer is to fear God. To fear Him. How do you approach God? You fear God. I'm not necessarily talking about cowering in fear, but the kind of fear that comes from recognizing God is in the heavens, we are on the earth. God is holy, we are sinful. God is perfect, We are not. God knows everything. Our knowledge is limited. God has no limits to his might. We have so many limitations. God's strength knows no bounds. His wisdom knows no bounds. His power knows no bounds. His love knows no bounds. And yet in all of these, we are very limited. Fearing God is recognizing that and approaching him. You know, it's the attitude in a small way you would have when you try to do something on your own, and then you finally realize you don't know what to do. You finally recognize you need help. And you go to someone else with the attitude of, you know, I don't know what I'm doing. Could you help me? Could you teach me? Could you guide me? This is the attitude we are to approach God with. The New Testament makes it so clear that what God has done for us as he has opened a way for our sinful, impulsive, blabbering mouths to even have access to a holy God. And that is the gospel. The good news of the gospel is that we do not get to approach God because we have done everything right. We've crossed all our T's perfectly and dotted all the I's and we haven't left anything out and we've done it perfect, so now we get access. That's never the way to access to God. If you remember from the beginning of this text, he talks about bringing a sacrifice when they came to worship. It's because sinful people have always needed forgiveness to approach God. You will not get into God's presence because you're better than the rest of us. You will get into God's presence because you recognize you're sinful like the rest of us. But Jesus is the holy and perfect son of God who laid down his life to pay for your sins. Our access to God doesn't come through our perfect obedience or our perfect words, but it comes through what Jesus has done. You're not saved because you prayed the prayer right, that you said the right words in your sinner's prayer. I can't tell you how many people wonder if they are gonna be at peace with God because they're not sure they did it right. They're not sure they prayed it right or they said the right thing. Friends, don't base your hope for eternity on the words that you said. Base them on the fact that God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that He died in your place, and that He says whoever believes in Him would not perish, but have everlasting life. Base your hope not on what you have said or what you have done. No, the way you can approach God is through what Christ has done for you. There is peace with God through the work of Jesus. The offering that we bring is not our own, but we point back to the offering of Christ, what he has done for us. Our hope with God is what God has done for us in sending his son. That's the gospel. That's the good news. It doesn't depend on you. It depends on what God has done for you. And what God does, he does perfectly. He does without mistake. That's why he promises that those who come to him are not going to be turned away. Those who come to him through Christ are accepted. They are held in the Father's hand. No one can pluck them out of that. He saves and he secures. Our hope for heaven is based on that. But we need to be careful, then, as God's people who are saved by his grace, that we don't come into his presence like fools. Just saying things we don't mean. Going through the motions of worship without putting our heart into it. Coming to church wondering if God is gonna do for us what we need instead of drawing near to hear what he has to say. So these warnings from Solomon about how to approach God. Before you act, listen. Before you speak, think. And when you promise, act. May we do this? Psalm 66, 13 says, I will go into your house with burnt offerings. I will pay my vows, which my lips have uttered and my mouth has spoken when I was in trouble. Let's bow our heads for a moment before the Lord. Before I pray, before we have any music play, before we do anything else, stop for a minute And remember, you're here on earth, God is in heaven. Maybe there's promises you've made in the past that have been brought to your mind. You need to confess to God right now that it was wrong of you to make that promise without making effort to follow it through. Maybe you come and you've not come to hear, but you've come to demand of God. Talk to him about that now. I'm just going to be quiet. And in the stillness of the next minute, you can approach God with what he's spoken to you about today. Let's pray together. Oh, Lord. We all recognize. That we are simple people. So we come confessing God. There are many times that. Before. We did something. We didn't listen to you. Before we came to worship, we didn't come to hear from you. We confess, Lord, that before we've come to you in prayer, we've come without thought. We've come just saying a bunch of stuff, thinking that if we can string together the right formula of words, we'll get what we want. We've come, Lord, without fearing you, without recognizing you as we do right in this moment. So, God, we confess. We need your forgiveness. We need your mercy. Lord, we have often made vows to do better to try harder, to serve in some way and failed to fulfill those. Lord, we confess that we quickly forget even about making them. We quickly forget about the importance of them. Lord, we've been fools. I've been a fool. And the way I've talked to you and made promises to you Lord, we need your mercy. We need your help, God. Lord, we praise you. We praise you for sending your son for our sins. That our forgiveness is secured by Christ. There is nothing we could do. Lord, you have done what was impossible for us. You have laid down the perfect sacrifice to pay for our sins so that our access to you does not depend on our performance but on what Christ has done. Oh Lord, we praise you and thank you that with joy we can come before you not because of who we are but because of what you've done. Lord, teach us to come into your presence fearing you. We're not thinking we have the answers, but knowing you do. Not thinking our plans are the best, but knowing yours are. Not flippantly promising things. Lord, but knowing that you hear our words and you expect us to follow through on what we've committed to you. So, God, we ask your help for this. We ask you to help us, Lord, to turn to you with all our hearts. Lord, we thank you for the joy of approaching you. And Lord, we pray that even as we hear these warnings and cautions today, you might fill our hearts with the wonder that you are in heaven and we are on earth, and yet, Lord, you hear us when we cry to you. You care about our requests. You urge us to come and ask and to receive, to seek and find and to knock and to have it opened. So Lord, we do come asking and seeking and knocking, knowing that you have provided this way for us to approach you. So God, we pray that as we leave this place today and we go about facing all the things that are out in the world around us, that we'd be quick to approach you and hear your wisdom. Seek your ways. Trust in your working in all these things. That you'd help us, Lord, to look beyond what we can see and instead look to what we can hear in your word. and know the truth about who you are and what's going on in the world. To walk in the fear of the Lord. We pray these things today in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Well, let's