Ecclesiastes chapter 7, verse number 10. Say not thou, what is the cause that the former days were better than these? For thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this. Heavenly Father, we pray that we might be reminded that today is the day in which we live. Tomorrow is a day of expectation and fulfilled promise, but the past is past. We pray that we might grow beyond the past and live in the presence with our eyes set on heaven and the return of our Redeemer. We pray that you'd mildly rebuke us this evening. Direct us, we pray, for your glory. In Jesus' name, amen. I don't get around very much. I married a wonderful woman 55 years ago, and most of the time, I'm at her house. Don't get around very much. And I've been pastor of this church now for 35 years, and I don't run around on you either. I don't window shop. watching other women or other preachers as far as that goes. I don't subscribe to any religious journals. So I'm not an expert on trends in religion. But I have heard, I have been told by others that there is not a lot of doctrine being preached out there from some of you who travel more than I do. I have heard that many ministries in this country rarely get down and dirty, shall we say. I have been told that in fear of offending people, many pastors avoid preaching the Bible's do's and don'ts. They avoid the 10 commandments. I've been told that deacons or elders sometimes tell the preaching elder, don't preach on hell. or this other doctrine or that other doctrine. I hear there are a great many ministries are more about the positive things than the negative things. And I can understand that. They're easier to preach. But what do I know about them? I'm just a self-centered, short-focused preacher who is generally interested in us and myself, I suppose. Assuming what I have heard is true, let's consider this text from Ecclesiastes. Do you know what Ecclesiastes means? Go to the chapter one and look at the title before 1-1. Ecclesiastes or the preacher. Brother Berg got that right. Ecclesiastes is the book About the preacher, King Solomon may have been the penman, but in this particular case, he took his crown off and bareheaded, he picked up the word of God and he started to share it with people. And to be honest, the two paragraphs which begin this chapter would not be very enjoyable to preach. Even though there are no thou shalt nots in here, these are dark verses. And even though there are some memorable statements in these 10 verses, they are not for the most part fun verses. So let's just read them. You can see what I'm talking about here. A good name is better than precious ointment. And the day of death is better than the day of one's birth. Hmm. It's better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting. For that is the end of all men, that is mourning. The living will lay it to his heart. Sorrow is better than laughter. Wait a minute, that's just not true. But it is true. For by the sadness of the countenance, the heart is made better. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. It's better to hear the rebuke of the wise than for a man to hear the song of fools. For as the crackling of thorns under a pot is burning, so is the laughter of the fool. This also is vanity. Surely oppression maketh a wise man mad, and a gift destroyeth the heart. Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof. And the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. So be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry, for anger resteth in the bosom of fools. say not thou what is the cause that the former days were better than these for thou dost not inquire wisely concerning this if If these are texts that the Bible preachers are supposed to expound, then many of us Bible preachers need to be embarrassed because we don't preach this sort of stuff very much. This is not fun. Here are words like death and mourning and sorrow and fools and vanity and anger. These are not upbeat subjects. These are not fun, and maybe that's exactly the reason why they need to be preached more. I'm not going to start a series of messages from Ecclesiastes 7. Maybe I should, but I'm not going to do it. I'm going to skip over nine of those verses and go back to verse number 10. The preacher exhorts us, say not thou, what is the cause that the former days were better than these? For thou does not inquire wisely concerning this. If the former days were better than today, then it might be worth asking, why? But the fact of the matter is, they weren't any better than today. And we're wasting our time in trying to make that comparison. Creation was cursed long before the day in which we live and governments have been corrupt ever since Nimrod. It's not some new thing that's come along. Maybe we have new addictions today, but addiction has been around ever since Noah, probably long before that. People have gotten sick and died since time immemorial. Grief is not something new. Sadness is not something new. And what we may remember as being a better day may not really have been a better day. There's a softening power in distance. There's a softening power in the passing of time. A mountain may actually look like a molehill seen from a great distance. Then you drive into those Canadian Rockies, and you look at those things leaning over you, and you say, well, this is a dangerous place. This is a tough country. Time, up close, compared to time far away, has the same characteristics. Something which thoroughly embarrassed you when you were 18, now you laugh about. Why was I embarrassed at that? That's silly. but that's the way it was. And something which terrified us in the past is more like a dust bunny today under the bed. That's not a monster under there. Maybe you should clean it out, but it's not a monster under there. And similarly, we may read a biography. I like to read biographies. We may read a piece of history. And we think, how wonderful it would have been to live alongside those people in those exciting days. Wouldn't that have been fun? Solomon, the preacher, tells us that in those old days, Maybe we think that they are wonderful because that's what our ignorance suggests to us. When it comes to wishing we were living in the days of Christ Jesus, or David, or among the separate Baptists who evangelized the East Coast 250 years ago, we remember the highlights. We remember the best parts. How many of Christ's disciples died in their beds after long, peaceful lives? Not one of them. One died an elderly man, but his was not a peaceful life. David may have been chosen king, but for some time he lived as a fugitive in the wilderness, living in caves. That sounds like fun, doesn't it? Yeah, for a week in the summertime. Yeah, that sounds like fun. Several of those early Baptists in this country were jailed, were stoned, were whipped and otherwise abused. But those are not the things that we remember when we think of the good old days of David and Jesus and Baptist history. Let's say you just finished reading Wilder's little house on the prairie. Life was simple. Families were tight. Love abounded. Game was everywhere. Fish filled the streams. Oh, wouldn't it be wonderful to go back to Minnesota and live like those people did back then? Ah, would you like to give up your nice warm house and your nice warm jacket and your nice warm boots to get out there in a week of blizzard at 20 below, 30 below, 40 below? Are you ready for that? Are you ready to exchange that bathroom of yours with a nice hot shower for an outhouse and a big pot once a week? Those people didn't have painless dentists. They didn't have penicillin. They didn't have refrigerators. They didn't have Starbucks. We don't really want to give up all we have today. We just want to give up a few of things today for a few of the things that they had, but not a complete reversal. The person who wants the past has forgotten too much about the past, even his own past. This kind of attitude usually indicates a spirit of discontent. Most of the time, it's not the situation that's messed up, it's the people who are in the situation that are messed up. I'm talking about us. I can't prove my theory because the means are not available, but I'm reasonably sure that the person who yearns for the past probably wasn't satisfied with the past when he had. Of course, when we were 12, there wasn't a thing in the world to worry about. But once we got to be 20, and that was 50 years ago, yeah, 20s back then was exciting, shall we say. This sounds like I'm changing my subject, but I'm not really. What all of us need to remember is our own unworthiness. We need a bit of humility today. What we possess today is in all likelihood more than we deserve. We certainly have more stuff than we deserve, and We probably have less troubles than we deserve. The more we grow in Christ, the more godly and Christ-like we become, the more we should enjoy the grace in which we now live. There is a New Testament word that pops up every now and then, contentment. We need to learn to be content. God hath not dealt with us according to the depths of our transgressions. His greatness and his goodness have been showered on us, have been poured on us, have been rained down on us. And rather than looking back at the good old days of our grandparents or the earlier days of our own lives, we should count our many blessings, naming them one by one, 10 by 10. an attitude of discontent usually supersedes the circumstances against which we are discontent. The disgruntled man is usually someone who would have been disgruntled 50 years ago and will be 20 years from now. He'll probably be disgruntled because as long as he lives in this world, he finds himself in it. And this world is not a place to help us unto God. We have to admit that as Christians. The grass is not always greener on the other side or on the backside. Sometimes that's just astroturf. It's not going to do us any good. Solomon doesn't come out and say it, but the backward-looking man may be afraid to look forward. Over and over again, the Bible shows us that with the right spiritual makeup, our difficulties can become ladders. When I typed that out, I got to thinking, ladders. You know, I don't enjoy ladders. I don't like getting off ladders. And I dislike even more getting back on the ladder to come down. I don't like heights. Our past and problems and even our blessings are like ladders. And sometimes the higher we get, the more scary it becomes. That is where we're supposed to be. I'm not saying that, but sometimes it's scary to go places that we haven't been before, even though we're supposed to be there. As you know, with God's blessing, Israel escaped Egypt, beginning their long, slow, quick march to the promised land. Through their sins, life became difficult. And as they created their own problems, they started looking back and thinking, oh, those leeks and garlics, they sure were tasty. Yeah, they're tasty. Leeks and garlics have a lot of taste. But they forgot also about the taste of blood that fell into their mouths as the whip came down on their back. We want the links and garlics. But they forgot about the taskmasters. What if Israel had succeeded in returning to Egypt? History abounds with the names of people who overcame handicaps. And I'm not going to bore you with a long list. As it happens, in my biography reading yesterday at the gym, I ran across a guy named James Fanch, who died in 1767 after a long and useful ministry. His biographer said, Fanch's bodily presence was by no means favorable to his ministerial character. He wasn't as good looking as I am. he had a speech defect that stood rather in the way of his popular acceptance. But then he wrote, his penetration into divine subjects was so deep, his knowledge so clear, his judgment so sound, and his exertions accompanied with such primitive simplicity that those of his hearers who regarded the matter rather than the manner which rather than the manner, were highly delighted. And even those of a contrary caste often found their attention so arrested that they were compelled to admire what they first were disposed to despise. He didn't have anything to flawed as a minister, except he loved the word, and he knew the word, and he shared the word, and people got past his speech impediment, and his ugly face, and whatever else he had going on for him, and they listened to the word of God, and the preacher became unimportant. Some people, in the word of God, overcame physical handicaps to become servants of the Lord. Jeremiah confessed having the speech of a child. Does it mean that he was uneducated? Did he have a lisp or something? Amos was little more than a cattleman. Paul apparently had physical restrictions. The thing to keep in mind is that the God who made us what we are also controls our circumstances. So if we move forward in his will, the past becomes unimportant. Egypt becomes history, not maturity. The solution of our current dilemma, whatever that dilemma is, is found in obedience to the Lord, walking forward as he gives us light. It's found in surrender to him, striving to make the most of the lives he has given to us. Maybe you know the story about the frog who fell into the pail of cream. He's never been in a pail of cream before. Oh, you don't know that story? Oh, back in the 50s, we heard these stupid stories all the time. fell into a pail of cream. And he was used to the mud puddle. He was used to the pond down in the back. And here he is in the little house in the prairie backyard swimming around in his pail of cream. And he knew he was going to die. But he just kept paddling away and paddling away, churning up the cream. It was getting thicker and thicker and thicker until after a couple of hours or so, it was solid enough for him to hop out. Keep on churning. Backward people, backward-looking people, lack trust, lack hopefulness. Think about those last few verses of Romans 8. Who is there in the universe with power to separate us from the love of God? Simplifying it all, no one. Is there any place where we can go to somehow step beyond the sight or the hand of the Lord? David says, if I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold me. What is the likelihood that the dark days of David's life forced him to look back to those good old days with bears and lions and sheep and pastures. Those were fun days. Yeah, I forget about the bear, but no matter how much he might have longed to return to the old pastures, he couldn't do that. And while he yielded himself to the Lord and was filled with the Spirit, out flowed some of the greatest psalms that we've ever heard. He didn't give up. Solomon learned from his dad, said, don't you give up, don't look back. I had to laugh at this. In 1930, James Hargis and Charles Creighton, sounds like friends of my wife and family on my side, they drove a Ford. old Ford Roadster from New York to Los Angeles and back again in 42 days. Now these are days when not very many roads were paved. So this is dirt road. They did this and I suppose set a record as far as that goes. But the most interesting part of the journey was they drove this vehicle backward the whole way. Why would they do that? So that some preacher in 2025 could speak of them as an illustration. If I tried that, I'd be in trouble. I think Brother Berg was watching me when I went to the restaurant on Saturday trying to back the car into an empty parking lot with yellow lines there. I had to go at it two times to get it back in there correctly. But you did it well. Oh, thank you on the third try. I got it. If I tried to go very far backward for me, it would be a mistake. You need to go forward. Just pull right in there. You know what you're doing. The same is true with life in general. Looking back causes accidents. Paul teaches us to forget about those things which are behind and to reach forth unto those things which are before us. He tells us to press forward, press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. Our target and our standards are not behind us, they're in front of us. Let our affections be set on things above, not on things on the earth. Do you recall when Paul was being carried to Rome for trial before the emperor and his ship was caught in a storm? Life-killing storm, life-stealing proportions. After Paul's warning and encouragement, everybody stay on board. The Lord has told me we're going to make it safely. The sailors, some of the sailors thought about taking to the lifeboats and escaping. Paul said to the centurion and to the soldiers, except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved. We are in the ship, which the Lord has provided for us. We are going the direction that he has ordained we go. He's bought passage for us, shall we say. He's taking us to the promised land of America, or maybe it's a prison ship and we're going to Australia, but it's still the Lord's ship. And the storm, that's a pretty big storm, but that's, Not important because the Lord calms storms when he chooses to do so. It's the Lord's ship. It's the Lord's storm and he bought the ticket. Don't give up the ship. And the application of it all is trust in the Lord and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him and he shall direct thy path. Don't worry about the past. Just keep moving forward.