Turn with me then to Ecclesiastes chapter 3. We've been looking at this book. As we've said, something of a dangerous book to try to preach through. I don't know that we'll go to the end. I haven't thought that far, to be honest with you, but the Lord continues to plot us along from passage to passage. And we do very much feel a draw to these first eight verses of Ecclesiastes chapter 3. perhaps, um, certainly probably a top 10 familiar passages of scripture for us for you. Even those who don't read their bibles or never darken the doors of church have probably in some way or some some version of heard this these verses. And before I read, which is unusual. I usually like to start right away with the reading of the scripture. I struggled a little bit with how to frame my thoughts here today. And I want to tell you that we've reached the gospel of Ecclesiastes. And I found it interesting, Brother Bart this morning got the Kleenex box and said, I'm ready for Ecclesiastes. And I thought I might surprise you today because we've reached the gospel of Ecclesiastes, the good news of Ecclesiastes. In some ways, this is what God's kind of placed on my heart. That's that's what I want to share with you today is after verse chapters one and two, all is vanity. Everything's empty. It's all void. There's no meaning to it at all. Life under the sun is without purpose. And so many of us feel that way at times. Probably every human being on the planet if they've been honest with themselves have been in that place. There's no point in this There's no purpose to this I get up in the morning and I go to work I go to school and I do the same things and I go to bed and I repeat the pattern the next day and there's just no purpose and no point and someone is If we might be so bold as to say maybe a little depressing in the first two chapters of Ecclesiastes, this is why this book is so hard to preach from, because you really need to look at all 12 chapters in one setting. But as you know me, that would take us probably a couple of years. But today we reach the gospel, the good news of Ecclesiastes. Life is not without meaning. It is not void. So let's read these passages, these verses and pray that God would be with us as we do so that his spirit would accompany the words as they're spoken. For everything, there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together. A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. A time to seek and a time to lose. A time to keep and a time to cast away. A time to tear and a time to sew. A time to keep silence and a time to speak. a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace. The gospel of Ecclesiastes or perhaps we might say the right time for all things is what this passage is telling us. You know, when Solomon starts out this chapter this way, that for everything there is a season, It reminds us and it teaches us something, I think, that's not necessarily intuitive, especially for those who've been raised in church, which is a good thing. God admonishes parents to raise their children in the admonition of the Lord and his presence of his people. But there can be, I think, sometimes in our minds, in our hearts and what we think the idea that right the right thing is always the same thing. That the right thing is always one thing or another. In other words, we think that it is right to never kill or it's never right to do so. We think that it's never good to weep. We think that it's always wrong to think that war is something that we should engage in, that war is always wrong. We think in these terms, these categorical terms. And one of the things that we need to be careful about, as I begin my remarks this morning, is to be careful that we don't slide into the idea of situational ethics. where we act one way in a certain circumstance and believe and act in another in a different. That's not what Solomon is saying, but we do need to be careful to realize that the right thing, wisdom, is not knowing what the right thing is all the time. It's knowing what the right thing is at the right time. It's knowing when to weep and when to laugh. It's knowing when to kill and when to heal. It's knowing when to do one or the other, these 12 things that Solomon lists here for us. But we can get in our minds this idea that it's always right to do one thing and wrong for another. As Baptists, we are notorious and historically known for saying it is always wrong to dance. And then we read Samuel and David dancing. Movies have been made about it. It's always wrong to do this, or it's always wrong to do that. And while that type of thinking might make decisions easier, life is far too complicated for it. It's far too complicated for that kind of simple view of right and wrong, isn't it? There's far too many times when the real question is, what do I do now, in this moment? Do I weep? Do I do I laugh? Do I mourn? Do I dance? Do I kill? Do I go to war or do I sue for peace? Do I let this thing break or do I try to mend it? Knowing what is right at the right time is the challenge. And there is good news that I want to share with you today, as we said, this gospel of Ecclesiastes. There is wisdom in understanding the right time to do the right thing. And again, we've all experienced this in our lives when we found ourselves in a situation of one kind or another where the right thing seems to elude us. And we fall back even on the idea that there's always a right thing to do in all and every circumstance. Maybe it was a struggle for you of when to say something. Or when to just be silent. You ever struggled with that? Lord, do I say something or do I just remain silent? Maybe that wasn't it. Maybe it's been a time where you've wondered about laughing or weeping. Maybe it's been a time where you've wondered, should I love this thing or should I hate it? These opposites. Life and the human heart The complexities that we find there outside of Christ in some ways, not certainly in all ways. Solomon, one of the wisest men to walk the face of the earth, certainly had his issues. But he saw things clearly in a lot of ways, and he comes to this reality in the first two chapters. It's all vain. It's all empty under the sun. Never forget that phrase under the sun, this life apart from An understanding of the next is what he's talking about. And now, though, he comes to this place. And if you would have stopped reading in Ecclesiastes after chapter two, he'd probably thrown up your hands and walked away depressed. But here, all of a sudden, he he says these verses so beautiful, so poetic and yet so true. And he teaches us that there is a time for all of these things. It would be difficult, I think, for us to look at this list of 12 things and find anything that falls outside of the boundaries of human experience. It's here. It's either spoken about directly or indirectly. Everything in your life is encompassed in these eight verses, in these 12 things that Solomon compares one way or the other. Practically every emotion, every activity, and every experience of life seems to me to be covered here. And according to Solomon, there is a season for every one of them. And that word season in the Hebrew, it means an appointed occasion. That's important. There is a season. There is an appointed time for every thing. There is an appropriate season for every thing in our lives. So then, everything that we experience, there is an appointment for it. Now, the implications of that for us cannot be overstated. The implications of what Solomon has just said in verse one cannot be overstated. cannot be underestimated for the importance that they are to have on our life. Solomon to this point, as we've said in this book of Ecclesiastes, he's told us that everything under the sun, everything in this life is vanity, but that does not mean, the gospel of Ecclesiastes here, that everything under the sun here on its own is vain, does not mean there isn't an appointed time for every experience that the human being experiences in this life. Just because weeping on its own and for its own sake is vain does not mean that there isn't an appointed time to weep. Just because building something on its own and for its own sake just to build something is vanity and emptiness according to Solomon doesn't mean there isn't an appointed time to build. Just because laughing you ever enjoyed some time together, but then later maybe even grow depressed or you're disappointed and you look back at the time of your laughter and you say that was just pointless. It was empty. It doesn't it hasn't brought anything forward to me today. And just because laughter on its own is vanity and empty doesn't mean there's not a time to laugh. Just because all of these things that we experience in our life on their own and separated from God, separated specifically in looking at just this life. Is vain and empty doesn't mean that there isn't a right time for it all. I want to I want to continue to bring that thought toward and forward this morning for us to consider, I think that's the One of the primary things that God wants to communicate to us today from this passage, one of the greatest challenges of scripture and understanding it, and specifically, as we said, preaching from Ecclesiastes or studying this book, is that it's so easy to miss the forest for the trees. It's so easy to miss the tree for the leaves. It's so easy to miss what God is saying through it all when we look at a specific place. And I don't know how else we can tackle things in a timely manner than to do so. But we must always come back up to the 50,000 foot view over this whole thing and look at it. This is one of the challenging things about scripture and understanding it is it's easy to take things out of context. And if one stopped, as we've said, reading Ecclesiastes at chapter two, again, they throw their heads up. I know I would in great despair. I'm glad Ecclesiastes doesn't stop at chapter two. I'm glad it moves forward. I'm glad Genesis didn't stop at chapter three before verse 15. I'm thankful for that. If there is one thing that seems clear to me from the balance of scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, when we read what God has done for man, When we read of all that has happened, the history that is contained in the Bible, and then we turn the page in the New Testament and we read all about Jesus, about what he has done for us, about what God has done for us in sending us his son, it seems abundantly clear to me that God does not want us to be in despair. He does not want us to be broken and sorrowful. He wants us to be full But one taken out of context, these first two chapters can lead to an imbalance in one's view of life. If there's one thing, again, that seems clear to me, though, in the scriptures, God does not want his creation to be cynical or unhappy or broken in despair. He's done more than the human mind could ever imagine on its own to ensure that that doesn't happen and that that's not the case. What you have read and what we have studied together to this point in chapters one and two of Ecclesiastes, I think is largely Solomon's conclusions about life under the sun, separated again from a connection with God. Everything in your life, If it's not tied to God, if there's not a string back to your relationship with him, everything in your life, we've said this already, we're going to say it again. Everything in your life that doesn't have a tether back to God is going to end where Solomon says it ends, which is vanity and emptiness, void. And it's not going to satisfy, it's not going to content you in this life, much less the next one. But there is a right time for all of these things. You though, if you you see this life apart from God and and isn't that what the enemy has been doing to our nation from its education systems, to its governments, to its popular culture, to its media and its art is just trying to bring to build a vacuum of God in our society. And no wonder so many, we live in the land of the greatest earthly and physical prosperity that the world has ever seen. And yet probably there's as much depression and anxiety and fear as there's ever been. Because these things don't bring satisfaction and contentment. And you'll look out into the world, separated from God, and you'll see all the business of man, and you will do what Solomon did, which is say, it's just all empty. It's just all vain. You'll see that building great buildings as costly and as difficult as that might be is vain. I've always wondered about that, and I don't want to cast stones unnecessarily, but I've always wondered about the purpose in building something just so your name can be on it. And long after you're dead, somehow that matters to you. I've never really quite understood the thinking. It doesn't mean that there isn't something to understand about it. It just means I've never understood it. But without God, you'll see that weeping is vanity. It leaves you empty. There's no hope at the end of those tears. There's no hope to be found at the end of that brokenness and that darkness that overwhelms you at times in your life because of a loss, because of whatever the situation in your life might be that's causing the burden. You'll see that weeping alone doesn't change anything about your circumstances, and you'll find it to be vain. You'll see that laughing without God is also vanity and rarely lasts very long and rarely makes you feel good inwardly. But God wants us to laugh. You'll begin to understand as well that all is indeed vanity and empty in this life if it is consumed for its own sake, all of it. from relationships to money and everything in between. If it's consumed for its own sake under the sun here, it will be seen and it is vanity. But now Solomon points us to something quite the opposite of this, quite the opposite of vanity. Do you see that yet? He says to us, for everything there is a season. And as we've said, that means an appointed time An appointed time strongly implies, does it not, a purpose, an intention, a design? So in one sense, can we not say that everything has a purpose? If it has an appointed time, then it must have some corresponding purpose. God, among all things in the world, can be described as one who has a point and a purpose of all things that might be purposeless. God is not one of them. And the things he does is not either. But we have to ask ourselves and confront the question here as we've turned to chapter three, is Solomon somehow contradicting himself? He said everything is vanity. But now he's saying that there is an appointed time for everything. Is he saying something different? Is he contradicting himself? Is the Bible, as so many tried to claim, contradicting itself? I hope your immediate response to that question is no. I hope just inwardly you just rebel at that whole idea because you'll find that that's going to be true if you look and carefully consider. And such is the case here. But I want to give you some things to consider in light of that question. Is Solomon contradicting himself? Is life empty and void? Or all of a sudden, did Solomon wake up on the right side of the bed this day when he wrote chapter three? And of course, we know he didn't say chapter three. But when we got up and he wrote this, was he in a better mood? Were things looking better for him? No, I think he understood and he's saying much of the same thing. This needs to be considered, I think, as we read these verses in light of ourselves and this life only. When you read the first two chapters, all is going to seem empty and vain. But consider considering life next to eternity in God. Seeing everything that happens in your life in relation to God and in relation to how it ties to him and your eternity that he has designed, then all of a sudden, everything you say, yes, it has an appointed time. My tears and my laughter, my building and my tearing down, my going to war and my staying at home for peace. Life is not purposeless. Life is not purposeless. Your days are not supposed to feel meaningless. Your time on this earth is not meant to be an exercise in frustration and futility. You were not born to, like the mythical Sisyphus, as we've referred to before, push that boulder up the hill just to have it roll back down and push it up again and roll back down. That's not meant, that's not the intention of God. And I want to take a look again at a few of these things. We're not going to go through them one by one, except for the first two. I want to take a look at a few of these things Solomon refers to in these verses and emphasize the truth of the fact that for everything in life, there is a time, a season, an appointment. That God has made and thus is full of purpose. He begins a time to be born. How many of us in the room today chose our birthday? Of course, nobody. None of us chose that. We were nothing before we were something, and we could not and did not have the ability to call ourselves out of nothingness. That is the realm of God. God is the one who calls us, there is a time, an appointed time for us all, each one, to be born. It is God who decides when we will be born and no other. It is His choice to make and not yours or mine or anyone else's. Psalm 139 verse 13, the psalmist says, for you, speaking to God, formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I was not. Now, this is my words, not quoting any longer. I was not. And then I was because you called me from nothing into something me. You gave me life. You and I are the product of far more. than the combination of genetic material that forms together that a father and a mother contribute to the making of a child. You are a child, not merely of your parents here. You're a child of God in one sense that he gave you life. He did. That's why if you're separated from him, you feel an absence, an emptiness. Because your parents, your father is not with you. You are not with him. You are not near him. You are far more than that genetic material. You are a child of God who gave you life, who formed you and knitted you in your mother's womb. I've seen the billboard on the highway. I don't remember where it is. Think somewhere along 465. And it shows a picture of a baby and it says proof for God. And I say amen to that idea. He knitted you together in your mother's womb. He gave you life, so then, and on top of that, he says there's an appointed time for you to be born. God appointed a time for you to be born, for you to come from nothing to be something, and by the way, you'll always be something, because you've been made in the image of God. You are far greater. broader than time can contain. And I think in your heart, and Solomon is going to say this later, in your heart, I think you know that. I think if you're really honest with yourself and you dig down deep in there, you know that there is more to this life than the physical things that we engage with and that we see. There's an eternity that he has set in that heart of yours. He formed you, he called you forth, and he did it at an appointed time. He chose. to bring you forth into the world at this time. This should, I think, instill within us a sense of purpose for our lives, shouldn't it? I mean, if God purposely chose a time for you to be born, then does not it stand to reason that he had a reason for having you being born at this time? You, individually. No one else like you. No one else made up the same exact way as you in the sense of personality and thought. This should instill within us again, I think, the idea that because we know God doesn't do anything without a purpose and a reason, then I am alive today for a reason in the mind and the heart of God. And that alone is enough for the good news of the Gospel of Ecclesiastes to tell me that there's a reason for my life. There's a purpose because God specifically chose to make me live in this time. There's a reason you're alive today and not in 1922 or 1822 or 1222. There's a reason God did that. I don't know all of it and I don't think that you probably do either. But there is an intention in the mind of God for you to be alive at this particular time. Your life was intended to be now in the mind and the heart of God. My life began somewhere in April of 1973. My eyes opened in this world for the first time on January 11, 1973. And I saw this world that is under the sun for the first time. And I began a journey from that day to now. And 17,944 days have passed since that day. I think just shy of 590 months. That doesn't sound like very long. But when you consider how many months a typical person lives, I've got a little life bar on my daily planner and it updates every day automatically because it's digital. I'm 61% of the way through if I live to be 80 years old. It's just a reminder. And I read a quote the other day that time is the one thing that if it's lost, it can never again be found. And how true that is. But God intended for you to be alive, to bring you into this world today in these years. Some of those days in those 17,944, there've been a few great days. There've been some good days. Most have been average days. There've been some bad days, and there've been a few horrific days. But all of them purposed and intended in the mind of God. For this time, these this moment, these days, whatever they were, whether they were good or bad or anything in between, according to Solomon, what he says here in Ecclesiastes in chapter three, that that that time of my birth, it was at an appointed time. And so, too, for you. God chose to bring you into the world here today. So, too, for you. Solomon, again, he's been lamenting in these first two chapters about the vanity of life under the sun, the futility of life here. But once again, don't misunderstand. Keep reading. Keep thinking. It's only life under the sun separated from God that's vain and empty. Life in this world without regard for the next. You want to live a life of emptiness and despair and vanity, then live it thinking this is all there is. I don't care what you accomplish, you're going to end up thinking, wow, That's not very much. But if you live at understanding who God is and who you truly are, one called into existence by Him to live this life under the sun for a while, so that you then would meet Him later, then I think you'll live it very differently. Just as an aside real quick, some people I think we get nervous, Christian people, and I think for a right reason in some respects, they get nervous about man's ability now through science to clone life. Oh my goodness, we get all scared. I tell you that whether the genetic material comes together in the normal natural way or whether it comes together in a lab, it's God who's giving the life. And it will always be God who gives the life. That is something man cannot do. It's God who gives the life. Never forget that. Never forget that that's God who gave you your life. Surely we can see here, then again, that there must be a purpose for our lives and we understand that. I hope we do. So I hope we just we remove from our thoughts as we continue to look a look here at Ecclesiastes, that we distance ourselves, our hearts, our minds from the idea that as we nodded our head in agreement with Solomon, it's all vanity, that we don't end there. Then we remember again that he's talking about life without regard this life, without regard for the next. Surely, again, that would change the way we think about our lives. And if the very time of our birth wasn't random, then surely neither is our life. If the very beginning of it was purposed by God. But then surely we can't think of the rest of our lives as just some random, purposeless casting of the die. God has a purpose for you today, this day, this moment. And He's told us what it is. We're going to say that again here in a moment. But not only is there this time to be born, we cannot neglect the reality that there is a time to die. We have no choice, none of us did at the time of our birth, and we rarely have the choice at the time of our death, though sometimes we do, but there is an appointed time for both. A time to be born and a time to die. A time to start and a time to finish. A time to begin anew and a time to close down. The forgetfulness of this fact is striking to me. People think, behave, seem to believe that they're going to live forever. This is particularly true of young people we know, but I've even seen some old people that to me seem to think, you're not going to live forever, but you're acting like you think you are. People want to keep the idea of death far away from their thoughts, but by not considering that there is an appointed time for each of us to die, then we typically will fail to ever really live. You've heard the saying, if you've not found something in your life worth dying for, you're not really living. And I think in some degree that's saying what Solomon is saying here. So there is an appointed time for you and me, not only to be born, but to die. Shortly, I want you to stop and think, This is difficult stuff. We've talked about this already in the first few messages on Ecclesiastes. This is not easy stuff. This is not fill the church house with all kinds of people and make them feel good and pat them on the back. Everybody's happy and singing Kumbaya. I want you to think for a moment shortly after that appointed time for you. What will people be saying? Because you've got an appointment. The struggle is none of us have it in our appointment books. We don't know when it is. But shortly after that time, what will people be saying? And by the way, shortly after that time, what will you be doing? Where will you be? What will those you leave behind here under the sun be saying about you? What will they think when they think of your life? More importantly, What will they think about their life and God? Now, shortly before that time, and you don't know necessarily, as we've said, when it is, what will you be doing? All of these things we can continue to ask ourselves and wonder. But while again, we know that there is an appointed time, none of us know that exact moment. Death is never in our appointment books, but it's always in God's. He knows when that day for each of us is. He knows that I was going to make it at least 17,944 days. I don't know that I'll make it 17,945. I don't. And as we said this morning already, sometimes we think that it's far from us and these kinds of losses happen to other people, not us, but you have an appointed time. And I want to bear witness to the scripture to you today that that is true. It's true. Now, again, I believe like the idea of our appointed time of birth, the appointed time of death should be, and this is gonna be strange in the ears of the world, those who don't understand what I'm saying, the idea that there's an appointed time of death for you, for the child of God, the one who knows God, I think this should be something of a comfort. How strange is that? In the eyes and the mind of the world, how strange is that? This thing that is most dreaded By everyone on the face of the earth, Ponce de Leon started it, I believe, didn't he? Trying to look for this fountain of youth, this thing that is most dreaded. And by the way, if you want to know what I think would be most dreadful, it's eternal life here. That sounds pretty dreadful to me. And we don't have time to to go into why I think that all necessarily, but that's what seems dreadful to me. Death here is not something that I dread. There's an appointed time, January 11, 1973. I open my eyes in this world. There's going to be a day when I close them. And that isn't the end. It's not the end of the story, it is indeed, in many ways, the beginning. Death is not something we plan, but it is something that we know is planned for us. Again, that idea, the entire idea of death, something that we want to push away, But I believe for the child of God, it should be something of a comfort. This entire life under the sun here, it's temporary. It's temporary. Our lives here, whether they be long or whether they be short, by man's measure, it's just the prologue of the story. It's just the opening pages. My story is not really even started in some ways. The story of which I'm now speaking is my eternal story that begins when I leave this world. This world isn't the end of it, it's just the beginning. If you and I realized, and we will bring our comments to a close shortly, but if you and I realized just how short the story of our lives here are under the sun, compared to the eternity to which we are going, that we will all inhabit, we would all I think, think dramatically different than we do. We would make decisions dramatically different than we make if we truly understood that from if we lived 80 years and we started as a small child and then we got saved maybe as 10 years old and we gave the rest of our lives to serving the Lord, if we understood that from that moment To the end on this life, it's just the beginning. It's not the end. It's just the prologue. It's just the period on the end of the first opening sentences compared to the eternal life that I'm going to. I think we'd live life differently and we certainly wouldn't live it thinking it's meaningless and purposeless. We would say. This life has a purpose, it's to get ready for eternity. It's to be prepared to meet God. Now, again, I believe like the idea of our appointed time of birth, the appointed time of death should be that comfort to us. I don't dread that day. I don't look at it as an end. I see it for what it is, the period of the opening sentences, as we've said. I want to just summarize verses three through eight, because we've not really addressed some important thoughts that I'll quickly bring to your attention. How do you know? How do you know when is the right time to do what? How do you know when you should do one thing versus another? How do you know what is right in one situation and wrong in another? Solomon here, he lists 12 opposites and tells us there's time for it all. Time to kill, a time to heal, to tear down, to build up, all these things that he lists. There's a time for each of them. There's an appointed time. There's a right time for each of them. Doing the exact opposite thing in one setting is right. Doing that same thing in another is wrong. How do you know which one is right? The answer's at the end of the book, chapter 12, verse 13. The end of the matter, Solomon says. All has been heard, by the way, 12 short chapters. Solomon says, I've covered it all. And I think that's true. All the books of the world, they're covering the same material. Nothing new. He says, OK, the end of the matter, all has been heard. How do you know what to do when and when one thing is right and the same thing is wrong in another situation? Well, he tells us all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments for this is the whole duty of man. And I don't know that you can preach a single sermon on the book of Ecclesiastes without quoting that verse. It's all been heard. There isn't anything else to be discovered. There's no mind to go deeper into. Everything that is to be known has been known and is known. This is the filter through which all of our decisions to know what to do when, this is the filter through which it should be run. Am I fearing God and am I keeping his commandments? There are times when laughter brings us closer to God. And there are times when laughter takes us far from him. There are times when keeping something. When holding it, when keeping it prevents us from following God, and there are times when losing something does the same. How do I know? Fear God and keep his commandments. And what's the greatest commandment according to Jesus, the very son of God himself? Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. So in every moment of your life, what am I to do as David and the ark of the covenant is coming back in, and he's bringing back in, and he begins to dance? because of his joy that God is being exalted. And Saul's daughter looks at him and says, well, aren't you something to behold? The king of Israel embarrassing himself is essentially what she was saying. And he says, I'll embarrass myself again if it's necessary. I'm rejoicing in the Lord. How do you know when it's right to laugh and when it's right to weep? Where is God? There are times when tearing something down in our lives clears the way for God's presence, isn't it? And there are times when doing the same prevents him from doing so, from us being close to him. We could say the same for all 12 of these opposites. The question then in our lives is not what is right so much as it is what is right when it is right. and when it is right is understood by understanding the conclusion of the matter, which is to fear God and keep His commandments. If you want to live a life of purpose and meaning and contentment and joy, that's it. This is why it is such a heartbreak. It should break our hearts to see our nation turning its eyes from God, turning our children's eyes from God, and telling them, you're nothing but a set of genetic material that has somehow miraculously come together, and they believe all this ludicrous stuff, and they accuse the Christian of being simple-minded. When you dive deep enough into their beliefs and theories, you realize just how far off their rocker they really are to say all of a sudden, poof, it all came into existence from where nothing. And we're supposed to say these people are intelligent. And we, the Christian who believes the word of God, chapters one and two of how all this came to be to be in Genesis, are the simpletons. I'll get off my soapbox. Each of us, we could look at all 12 of these opposites and realize that there's a right time to do one or the other. And I'll close with this. Do you know, do you know, though, in all of these other things, in these things that are opposites, there's an interrelationship in them. To do one, you have to not do the other. What I mean by this, let's take, for example, the interrelationship between seeking and losing. He said, sometimes there's a time to seek, and then there are times to lose. There is no inherent right or wrong about seeking and losing, not in themselves. With the end of the matter in mind, We realize that there are times that we must seek and there are times that we must lose. And in order to seek something, we must often be ready to lose something else. In order to lose one thing, we have to seek something else. You have something in your life that you know you don't, you shouldn't have. Maybe sin is obvious. Some sin, let's just say that, some sin in your life that just, you just can't seem to shake it. Maybe it's a quick tongue, a quick anger. Maybe it's, I don't know what it could be, but it's something that you just can't seem to get rid of. You know what you may be struggling with? You're trying to lose something without seeking something else. Seek God. Seek him. Make that your mindset. There's a time to seek. And then as you seek, you'll lose. But so far, it's far too much of the time we're not willing to lose. We want we want it all, don't we? That's all. We just want it all. Well, it's not how it works. And I know that the young people of the day would say, you old fuddy duddy. You can have everything you want. Everybody tells us that. Everybody promises us that. Do you know how much we're setting our young generation up for disappointment and depression in their lives by telling them the silly things we tell them? You can have it all. No, you can't. But you can have all that matters, which is God. Seek him. Matthew 16, 25, Jesus tells us, whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. And finally, just real quickly, the example of hate and love. You know, the very idea that a Christian is to hate something is foreign to many profession Christians. head of a school for a short time, a couple of years in Christian school and wonderful people, wonderful Christians. But I was, I don't know if it was teaching or it was a devotion or whatever it was in a morning meeting. And I talked about this reality that there are things that a child of God should hate. And I had a teacher come to me in honesty and sincerity saying, that's just foreign to me. We're not supposed to hate anything. And I spoke with her and I told her, well, how can you not hate sin if you love God? How can these things be? Psalm 139, 21 and 22. Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with complete hatred. I count them my enemies. And you want to know what else I hate? I hate my sin. Oh, I'm tired. One day I'll be freed of it in body as I have been in soul. But there's a time for these things. We could go through each one of them. I encourage you to do that, by the way. I think it'd be a good exercise for your heart and your mind to go through these one by one. Look and lay them alongside your life. And be ready and understand when one is right and another is wrong. and ask God to give you the wisdom to know. I pray something's been said that has encouraged your heart. If you don't know the Lord, I encourage you to seek him. And maybe what's preventing you from doing so is a reluctance to let go, to lose first. But I want you to understand everything that you are fearful of losing, that you are just grasping as hard as you can, you're going to lose it anyway. And there's nothing you can do about it. I ask you to seek God because Him you'll never lose once you find Him. Him, He will never leave you or forsake you. Seek Him, lose everything else. It's just dust. It's rubbish. It's thrown out with the trash. It's not worth losing your eternal soul over. I don't care what it is. Seek him and find him today is our prayer. Let's have some.