So, before we begin, some of you might be wondering why did we invite this Canadian Reform Guide to speak at our RP family conference? And I kind of figured it out. Yesterday I kind of figured it out. So, Pastor Matt Kingswood came up and said that he met me for the first time when we were at the Fahel Seminary in Montreal together. What he failed to mention was that he was my teacher, and I was his student. And then I began thinking, actually, so Matt Kingswood taught me, and then Rich Gantz came to Pharrell and taught me numerous courses as well. And then Christiana Jamian. Some people know who Christiana Jamian was. Christiana Jamian taught me many courses and ended up being the dean of the Pharrell Seminary. And then I got the absolute privilege of being his pastor in the last days. They were all my teachers. And then also some of you might know Dr. Ed Robson. Dr. Robson also came up from the States and taught me an intensive course in the Book of Revelation. So like half my teachers were RP guys. So that's why I got invited. Which means that if you don't like what I'm saying, well I just got it from them. So you can't blame me. I have one really great story about Dr. Ed Robson, who came and taught us an intensive course in the book of Revelation when he was already well past the age of retirement. I think he would be in his 90s now or so. So he was teaching us the class, and I went to a seminary that, you can ask Pastor Matt, very few students. Like I think in our intensive course on Revelation, I think there was like three of us, which means you can't sleep in class and you can't avoid the questions. And we were having a break time, studying the book of Revelation. We had a break. And one of the other students in my class thought he would tell Dr. Robson a joke. So he said, hey, Dr. Robson, why will there be no women in heaven? Dr. Robson looked at him and said, why? He said, well, because in Revelation 8, verse 1, it says the seventh scroll was opened and there was silence. And all of us students sort of chuckled, like many of you did. But Dr. Robson just went stone-faced. And if you know him, he has these huge hands, like his hand is as big as my head. And he took his huge hand and he just slammed it on the table. And he said, don't you dare, as a bunch of young men, sit around a table and say disparaging things about your sisters in Christ. Don't you dare. And we're just like, that's good advice, isn't it? Woe be to us men if we sit around and make fun of sisters in Christ. We need to pay attention to our lives, careful attention to how we live. John 10 verse 10 says that Jesus came to earth to give us life and life in abundance. He came to give us life that is eternal life, but an eternal life that begins now, today. That Jesus came and spread his arms to die upon the cross for the forgiveness of our sins to give us life so that today we could rejoice and be glad in the day the Lord has made, so that we might live in godly ways also today and then throughout eternity. So if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, He is indeed paid for your sins by His grace through your faith, then you need to pay attention how then you live today as that life stretches out into eternity. Today, this day, is a gift that comes to you from God in the nail-scarred hands of Jesus. Christ died on the cross to give you life also today. And you want to receive that gift with careful attention to how you live in His grace. Let's ask the Lord for His blessing as we pay attention to how to do that also in midlife. Our Lord, Father in Heaven, we thank you, we praise you, we worship you, we lift up your name, hallowed be your name, for this is the day that you have made, and we will rejoice and be glad in it. And we come to you, Lord, humbly, asking that you would teach us how to live in the shadow of the cross, and how to receive this day, this period in our lives as a gift from you. O Lord, give us your grace. Be merciful toward us. Bless us also now with your Holy Spirit that we might rightly discern the word of truth and be blessed by it. In your name we pray. Amen. So, brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ, I was born in 1976. And kids can start calculating how old does that make them. Born in 1976. That means that I am 45 years old. The average male life expectancy in Canada, as I mentioned yesterday, is 80 years old. You women get to live a little bit longer than us. Average is 84. Which means that if I'm 45, I have slightly more years on average. Humanly speaking, I have slightly more years behind me. than I do in front of me. The path behind me is slightly longer than the path in front of me, if God gives me 80 years. If I live to a ripe old age, that would mean that today, I'm right in the middle. I'm in the middle. Which means that they call me middle-aged. So raise your hand if you fit somewhere in the category of being middle-aged. Yeah, you kids can look to see if you got any. Yeah, you want to clap for the middle-aged people? Yeah, give them a hand. They're doing so well. Yeah. Being middle-aged comes with all kinds of really great blessings. I noticed that the other day where I went out with my extended family and we went out to Jack Astor's restaurant. And as I was at Jack Astor's restaurant, I noticed something. I noticed that Jack Astor's restaurant is entirely designed for middle-aged people. That's their target audience because they know that the middle-aged people are paying the bill at the end of the dinner. And so it's totally, everything about Jackass is toward middle-aged people. There are Fireside comics on the wall. Right? Which, when you're my age, Fireside was the thing when you were younger. That was cool. There's Fireside and Herman comics on the wall. That's the thing. And then there's sort of jokes that only middle-aged people would get written on the chalkboards. And then I got that dessert menu and it said on the top of it, pour some sugar on me. which only a middle-aged person knows, is a quote from Def Leppard from a song in our long-forgotten past. So one of the blessings of middle age is that you have restaurants that market to you. But there's so many other blessings to being middle-aged. Being middle-aged can be really quite wonderful. Here's one of the reasons being middle-aged is wonderful. You tend to mature emotionally throughout your life. As you get older, you tend to get older but more mature emotionally, so that by the time you're middle-aged, you're more emotionally mature than when you were younger. And that's pretty good, because it means that your emotions in middle-age tend to be a little bit more stable than when you were younger. And that's a real blessing. By the time you're middle-aged, you've often figured out sort of what you're kind of good at, what you're not so good at. You've kind of figured out a little bit more about who you are. By the time you're middle-aged, you've had the chance to develop good relationships, hopefully. had time to develop meaningful relationships, you let go of some of your reckless and silly youthful enthusiasm and perhaps some of the young silly actions of your youth have been left behind and you've got a little bit more maturity. And so you're able to contribute to the world with a measure of some wisdom. That's a blessing of middle age. And then if you're middle aged, actually being middle aged can often be some of the most productive time of your life. Middle-aged people are often at their prime in terms of productivity and what they're doing. And you often, in middle life, actually have something of real value to offer the world around you. And that's a real blessing. So midlife can be a really wonderful thing. So that's what you have to look forward to, everybody. You get to be middle-aged like us. And it's good. But middle life also has its challenges. It's got significant challenges. So there's some research that was done by David Blanchflower of Dartmouth College and Andrew Oswald of Warwick, University of Warwick. And what they did is they did a universal study across all kinds of different countries and cultures. And they were looking at the question of life satisfaction. When do people feel satisfied with their lives? And so they did this international study, and what they found across the world was a recurring pattern. They saw something, that there's something that's true, that seems to be true across the world and in different countries around the world. And so they came up with it, they came up with the results in sort of a diagram, sort of an X and a Y axis like this. And so the horizontal axis was age, so as you get older you move this way, and then the vertical axis was satisfaction with your life going up. Greater satisfaction going up. So age going this way, life satisfaction going this way. And what they found on that axis is that when you start your adult life, you start your adult life, you have high satisfaction with your life. You feel quite satisfied with your life. But then it begins to decrease. Your satisfaction with your life decreases and it sort of bottoms out in your 40s and 50s. and then it rises up again, so that as you get older, you again feel more satisfied with your life. So, life satisfaction at age, and it sort of goes like this, it's a U-curve. You start your adult life feeling satisfied, you feel less satisfied as you hit middle age, and then you increase and feel more satisfied again at the end of your life. And they found that to be true across the world, in all kinds of different cultures. Life satisfaction declines in the beginning bottom is out in your 40s to 50s and it rises up as you increase in age. So they call this the life satisfaction or the happiness U-curve. That's what they call it. And my point telling you that is that midlife has got all these blessings and midlife can be beautiful, midlife can be good, but the plain evidence of their research anyway shows that midlife can also have its challenges where you don't feel particularly satisfied with life and it can be difficult. And in some cases when the U-curve is not like this, but the U-curve is like this, with a beaker, then we talk about people having a midlife crisis. You've heard that expression before. A midlife crisis. Sort of a catch name. A person is having a midlife crisis. A little bit of a catch name like the terrible twos. How many people here have a child who had the terrible twos? Right? Yeah. So the terrible twos is when you have a two-year-old that, well, when you're two years old, you're kind of at the most violent stage of your life. Right? You bite people, and you do all kinds of crazy things that you wouldn't do as an adult, and so we call them the terrible twos. Their emotions are not quite regulated, etc. But here's the thing. Not every two-year-old has terrible twos. Most two-year-olds are cute, and lovely, and cuddly. And here's the thing about midlife. Not everybody has a midlife crisis. Most midlife people are cute, and lovely, and cuddly. Alright? Not everybody has, you know, a midlife crisis. But some do, and many of us do have a low point around midlife where we realize that, yeah, most of life is behind us now. And the path in front of us is a little bit shorter, and we can find being in that place a little bit disorientating, a little bit confusing. And so, oftentimes, people in their midlife do struggle in some way in this period of life. And so what I would like to speak about this morning is this theme. YOLO, you only live once in light of eternity. How to live when you're middle-aged. How to live when you're middle-aged. And I might just start this off before opening scripture to say that the Bible does not recognize midlife as a category. There is no midlife category in the Bible. The Bible talks about youth and about old age. There's no adolescence, there's no midlife. But I do think the passage we're going to read from the Book of Ecclesiastes does express many of the thoughts and sentiments as well as the teaching we need to hear when we're in midlife. And I'm hopeful that this is going to be helpful for all of you who are in midlife. But it'll also be helpful for you who are hoping one day to get to the glorious era of new life, as well as for you who feel that you've passed that. I pray that this will be encouraging for you. Let's open God's Holy Word. We're going to read from Ecclesiastes chapter 2. Ecclesiastes chapter 2, starting at verse 9, and we're going to read all the way to chapter 3, verse 15. Ecclesiastes chapter 2 verse 9. Let's give our attention, our careful attention to God's believer. So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me. Whatever my eyes desired and I did not keep from them, I kept to my heart. My heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done in the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity, and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. So I turned to consider wisdom and madness and folly, for what can the man do who comes after the king? Only what has already been done. And I saw that there is more gain in wisdom than in folly, as there is more gain in light than in darkness. The wise person has his eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. And yet, I perceived that the same event happens to them all. Then I said in my heart, what happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise? And I said in my heart that this is all so vanity. For of the wise, as of the fool, there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that in the days to come all will have been long forgotten, how the wise dies like the fool. So I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me. It was all vanity. striving after me. I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing I must leave it to the man who will come after me. And who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This is also vanity. So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes a person who is toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who didn't toil for it. This is also vanity and a great evil. What is a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils under the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his works is a vexation. Even in a night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity. There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also I saw is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? For to the one who pleases him God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner he has given the business of gathering and collecting, only to give to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and striving after men. For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. A time to be born. 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 meet 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 sow, 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. What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man's hearts, so that yet you cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceive that there is nothing better than for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live. Also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all this toil. This is God's gift to man. I perceive that whatever God does endures forever. Nothing can be added to it nor taken away from it. God has done it so that people fear before him. That which is already has been and which is to be already has been and God seeks what has been driven away. I'd like to start with you at chapter 2, verse 11. Chapter 2, verse 11. The teacher says, Then I considered all that my hands had done, and the toil I had expended in doing it. And behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there is nothing to be gained under the sun. So the teacher here, he's looking back on his life. He's looking at all of the hours that he put in. all of the overtime, all of the busyness, all of the hard work, all of the effort that he's dedicated to his family, and he's dedicated to his job, and all of the all of the things he's dedicated himself to. And he's looking back down the road. And he's saying, all vanity is all like a mist. I was chasing after all kinds of different things, and now I see what I really in the end was chasing was the wind, which you can't ever catch. So what did it gain me? What has my life amounted to after all of that? Is this all there is to life? Is this all there is? Has it been worth it? Is this as good as my career will ever get? I mean, what happened? How did I suddenly wake up and find myself here? Half my life done? This is it. I'm kind of disappointed. I wonder if those thoughts, that attitude sounds familiar to any of you. Look at verse 14 through 17. The wise person has eyes in his head, but the fool walks in darkness. Yet I perceive that the same event happens to them all. And I said in my heart, what happens to the fool will happen to me also. Why then have I been so very wise? And I said in my heart that this is also vanity. For of the wise, as of the fool, there is no enduring remembrance, seeing that the days to come all will be long forgotten. Wise guys just like the fool. So, I hated life. Because what is done under the sun was grievous to me. It's all vanity. Is there anything in that that resonates with you? Maybe you wouldn't say, I hate life. And you would say that. But listen to what we have here in scripture. The teacher is saying, it seems to me like all of my choices, all of my actions, all of the stuff that I dedicated myself to in the past, has not really amounted to much in my eyes. I had all these dreams, I made a bunch of sacrifices, I made choices and I worked hard and I did all this stuff. I tried to do what was right, And now I've hit middle age, and I'm wondering if it was all a waste of time. Because that's how it seems. And then sometimes when you're middle age, you look at other people's lives, right? You kind of look over the fence, and you'd be like, look at their life. Sometimes you look over the other side of the fence, you're like, they made some pretty lousy choices in their life, but they seem to have it better than me. I always tried to do what was right. What did I get? I certainly didn't get what I was hoping for. This is not quite the life that I thought I would get. It's not quite what I dreamed about. And then you can think about that in midlife sometimes also in terms of your relationships. I'd be like, well, is this as good as it gets? Like, I kind of thought it would be better. You know, I'm halfway done my life now. Is this as good as my marriage is gonna get? Is this as good as my friendship's gonna be? And then, you know, I haven't even done a whole lot of things that are memorable in life, like if I were to die today, would anybody even remember anything? Have I done anything worthwhile? I spent my whole life doing what I was told, following the rules, doing all the right things, and now, it doesn't seem like I got the life that I was promised. What happened to my dreams? What happened to the good life? So the teacher is saying, it's all just to see what the fellow is chasing after, man. You could kind of hear the regret in his voice, man. And I wonder how many of you have regret in your voice in midlife? I wish I would have done something different. I wish I could maybe go back, change a couple things. And then maybe sometimes you have the moments where you're like, actually, I hate my life right now. And I want something to change. I need something new. And so you end up disappointed and disillusioned. Midlife at the bottom of this U-curve can be characterized by that. A feeling of disappointment and disillusionment. Chapter 2, verse 18, I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing I must leave it to the man who will come after me. Verse 22, what is a man from all the toil and the striving of heart with which he toils under the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart doesn't rest. It's all vanities. It's days of sorrow and nights of no rest and work that doesn't satisfy. And so his life feels like a trap. It feels like he's spinning his wheels. He's like the hamster in the cage. He's like, really, this is it? And so to date myself, I remember a song by the rock band Smashy Pumpkins when I was younger. Them singing, despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage. And you wonder how many of us in midlife are like, yeah, despite all my rage, I feel like a rat in a cage. disappointed and disillusioned and dissatisfied with my current circumstances. And then, perhaps, having this thought, this desire, where I just wish I could escape it. I wish I could get out of this. So, this section of Ecclesiastes lays out in some very stark way So very stark terms. What a lot of people in midlife, at the bottom of this life satisfaction u-curve, what a lot of people feel, or what a lot of people have experienced, whether that they experience that in a midlife crisis, in a real deep way, or that they feel it sort of as background thoughts that sort of surge up at four in the morning when you can't sleep. And so maybe we're not all going to have a midlife crisis. Crisis is a dramatic word. But many of us in midlife sort of have a midlife drizzle. A mid-life drizzle of disappointment and a drizzle of disillusionment about our lives. And sometimes that can mean you sort of get this persistent sense of restlessness, like you should be doing something other than what you're doing. And then sometimes it can, yeah, it can become quite dark and you can have bouts of real sadness or real pessimism or a real deep and dark lack of hope. And it comes out, if you listen for it, it comes out when you speak to one another. And you hear conversations that are sort of laced with regret. Laced with some disappointment. It comes out in the jokes people make. There's regret and disappointment there. It comes out in increased irritability and bitter thoughts. Bitter thoughts that you try to suppress but that still surge up. Frustration about it. It comes out also in this way. When you're daydreaming. You're sitting there and your thoughts, you allow your thoughts to go off and daydream about other possibilities. Other things that you'd like to do. Other people that you'd like to be with. Daydream of opportunities lost. You can sort of begin to fantasize a little bit about hitting the road, maybe. Maybe doing something different. Oh, I can fantasize about that. About going somewhere else, changing my circumstances, starting fresh. People in that low part of the U-curve also can end up experiencing dissatisfaction with family life, with marital status, for instance. They begin to daydream, or perhaps conspire, to change that. The temptations to cheat on your spouse, or to find a new one, or to throw yourself into a relationship as a single person, and whatnot, throw yourself, to make some big change. Or it could come out the opposite way, too, where it's this laissez-faire passive-aggressiveness, where you've just stopped caring about stuff. So midlife, you can have these feelings of disillusionment and disappointment and dissatisfaction, and then you can sometimes just say, well, nothing matters anymore, and you just go do nothing, and you let yourself go in every way, you don't care about anything. Or what you do is you run to something different, and so you get people in midlife who get to dress like they're in their 20s. Right? Have you seen that? Where you're like, what are you doing? Trying to regain some youth and you start denying your age or people in midlife who begin to do crazy things and go partying and act recklessly and act like children again. People that go spend money and buy fancy new toys and try to go on really expensive holidays that they can't afford because they're trying to recapture something because they're dissatisfied and disillusioned. being in a spot on the road where there's more road behind them than there is in front of them. And some people go to all sorts of drastic measures, where they quit their jobs, do all kinds of different crazy things, or have affairs, or divorce their spouses, thinking that all of that will somehow give them happiness. And I'm speaking to you also from personal experience in that. I know a little bit about midlife restlessness, a desire for change in my own life. In early 2017, I woke up one morning and this is the thought that popped into my head. I had two thoughts. I thought to myself, this year I'm going to be And the other thought was, this year I will live in the same place for more than five years. And I grew up, I'm a pastor's kid, and dad served in churches around the world, and we moved a lot, and never in my entire life before I was 40 had I lived in one spot for more than five years. And so I woke up thinking, I'm gonna be 40? Like 40? and I'm going to live here for more than five years, and I just had this feeling of restlessness. I'm like, really, is this it? Like, 40? And I'm going to live here? Is this what my life is going to be? Maybe I should change it up. That was the feeling that came over me. Thinking, well, really, am I satisfied just with this? That was a pretty persistent feeling. And I'm guessing that there are numerous people here, and if it's not you, it perhaps is the person sitting beside you that says, yeah, there's something about what the author of Ecclesiastes is saying that resonates with me. Yeah, I kind of have lived or am living some of those sentiments, some of those feelings. And if you're saying, nope, you totally lost me, Pastor Winston. I'm really wondering why I'm here listening to you talk about midlife. Well, then I would say to all you young people, just wait. Just wait. So then the question is, how then shall we live? How do we live as Christians, also in midlife, in the bottom side of this life satisfaction curve? How do we deal with that as Christians? How do we deal with the disillusionment and dissatisfaction? How do we do that well? Well, first of all, you could just step back and say, before you even look at scripture, you could find some satisfaction or some hope in the fact that, according to the research, it's a U-curve. It goes back up again. So if you're like, yeah, I'm kind of feeling disillusioned and dissatisfied and struggling in life, you can just sort of look and say, well, yeah, well, it seems to me that's a common human problem, but that it tends, over time, to go back up again. So don't give up. Keep getting older. And perhaps it'll improve. There's some hope in there. One writer writes it like this. They say, midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s when you look at your life and think, is this all? And then midlife crisis ends about 10 years later when you look at your life again and think, actually this is pretty good. So stick with it for 10 years. But ten years, of course, is a long time. And we don't just look at the statistics in the world around us. We want to look at the truth of the Word of God. How do we deal with midlife as believers? And to answer that, I think that you need to remember two very important truths, okay? We're going to look at what this piece in Ecclesiastes says, but you have to remember two important truths. First of all, you have to remember that the key problem in midlife is a question of interpretation. The key problem of midlife is a question of interpretation, how you are interpreting things. So we tend to respond not just to the facts of our experience, we tend to live our lives according to our interpretation of those facts, our interpretation of our experience. And so the crisis of midlife or the feeling of disillusionment, disappointment, midlife, is not... The reason for that is not because you are in your 40s or 50s. The reason is because you are interpreting that reality of being in your 40s and 50s in a particular way. The problem is your interpretation. The problem is with your thinking. It's not with your age. That's an important thing to remember. We need to be transformed by the renewing of our minds if we want to deal biblically as Christians with midlife. And so, the first thing you have to remember, there's a problem of interpretation here. And then the second thing you have to remember is that midlife is full of opportunity. Midlife is full of opportunity. The Holy Spirit works in our hearts in whatever stage of life that we are in. Whatever stage of life we're in, the Holy Spirit is working in our life to draw us nearer to God in love, and closer to our neighbor in love. To love God and our neighbor. And that means that if you're having a midlife crisis, or if you're having a midlife drizzle of disappointment and disillusionment, You have to change how you're thinking, and you have to see midlife as full of opportunity. So remember those two things. The problem of midlife is interpreting things, and it's a question of opportunity. And it's opportunity that's full of, actually full of joy. All right. And if you understand those things, if you think about those things, you can turn to what we've read in Ecclesiastes and hear what the Lord himself is saying to us. Ecclesiastes chapter 3 verse 14. I'm going to read this section here. I perceive that whatever God does endures forever. Nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken away from it. God has done it. so that people fear before. That which is, already has been. That which is to be, already has been. And God seeks what has been driven away. So that last sentence, God seeks what has been driven away, is a difficult to understand sentence. But if you look at verse 14 and verse 15 together, it's reminding us that the Lord our God is sovereign. And he is in control of things. Now, you all, you know, you're all like, yeah, of course, sovereign, that's true. But do you actually believe that? That God is sovereign and is in control of your life? Do you actually believe that? He is sovereign in control of all your life, that God sees the big picture and is in control of the big picture in your life. For us, all of the grains of sand pour through the hourglass, right? We just watch our 4,000 weeks go through the hourglass. We have no control of it. But God has control of every single grain. And none of them pass through the hourglass without His sovereign will. Do you believe that, brothers and sisters? Do you believe that? God makes no mistakes. God never makes mistakes. Nothing happens outside of his control. He defines when we live. He defines where we live. He defines how long we live. He's in control of every last grain of sand that passes through the hourglass, and He's in control with His sovereignty over every aspect of your life. And God has not made one mistake in your life. You've made plenty. I've made plenty. But God has never made a mistake in your life. And that is how you need to begin to interpret your own life. God has not made a mistake in your life by bringing you to this stage in your life. God has not made any mistakes in bringing you to midlife. He is sovereign. It's not like God is looking at your situation and going, oh, that didn't work out like I hoped it would. Sometimes we think that, well, this certainly hasn't worked out like I hoped it would, but God is saying, oh, it's working out exactly how I've ordained it to work out. Where you are today, the circumstances in which you find yourself, is because God has ordained it so. Acts 17, says that the Lord has caused humankind to inhabit the whole earth. He's marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. Ecclesiastes says, for everything there is a season and a time for every manner under heaven. There is a time to be born, there is a time to die, a time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to love, a time to hate, a time to be young, a time to be middle-aged, a time to be older. God has determined that you are where you are today, at your age, in your circumstances. And you might not like that, and you might not understand it, but that doesn't change the fact that the Lord in His sovereign will has ordained it as such. And you might ask the Lord, why did you choose it like this? And why did you give me this? And why did you place me here? And why did you make my life look like that? But just because you don't understand it, or just because you have a feeling that it's bad, doesn't mean that God has not planned it in the perfection of His sovereign will, and that He indeed is in sovereign control of your life. Just because you might think that a certain stage in your life is bad, must confess as a believer that it has to be the opposite. God has ordained things in your life the way that they are, but he has done that with a purpose. And that purpose must, in some mysterious way, we must stubbornly hold on to this truth, that that purpose must be for good. Though we might not understand it. But all these things, even in midlife, are working together for the good of our salvation. Think of it this way. If God, the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, chose me before the creation of the world, God, the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, loved this world so much that He sent His only begotten Son. If God, the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, was willing to have Jesus go to the cross for me to pay for my sins with His precious blood and to set me free from all the power of the devil, if the Sovereign Lord of the Universe continues to preserve me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without His will, if the Sovereign Lord of the Universe is preparing a place for me today and for you, and is giving us His Holy Spirit to transform us and make us more and more into the image of Christ. If the Sovereign Lord of the Universe has caused me, by grace through faith, to belong, body and soul, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ, then I must I absolutely must, even if I don't feel it and if I don't see it, I must trust that the Sovereign God of the Universe has arranged things in my life and brought me to midlife in my current circumstances, in this place and in this time, and that He has not made a mistake. I must believe that. He hasn't made a mistake. And that's the correct way to interpret things in midlife. That's the correct way to interpret things. And many people, when they get older, will tell you that they look back and they see that, oh, oh, I see so much how the Lord has been good to me in ways that I didn't see when I was 50. Now, I'm not saying that that's easy. I'm not saying that you should be like, wow, Pastor Winston, good point. Now that I've got that clear, all of my, you know, disillusionment and discouragement just evaporates and it's all gone. You know, problem's fixed. Thank you very much. I'm not trying to be simplistic. There is a time in life to mourn. There's a time to grieve losses. There's a time to express heartache in life. One of the awesome benefits of being a psalm singing church is that you can express sorrow and frustration and disillusionment and discouragement collectively together to the Lord in psalm. It's not simplistic, but we all must say, I will take the very truth of God's goodness and his sovereignty over all things in my life and allow that truth in the renewing of my mind to percolate like the coffee this morning, percolate down into the depths of my heart and into my life. And I know that also from personal experience. As I said, in my 40th year, I struggled a fair bit with this whole being at midlife thing. For about six months, from about January to June. And what broke through it was this. I contacted my older brother, he's a couple years older than me, and he was sort of going through the same disappointment and dissolution. And so we read a book by Paul Schrepp, there's numerous of his books in the back there. We read the one called Lost in the Middle, which is about midlife. And the thing that struck me personally in that book was this very fact that I've been speaking of, that the Lord is sovereign. And that's not something that I just confess with my mouth. Something that I place my trust in, that the Lord is sovereign and that in His providence He has brought me here and hasn't made mistakes in my life, despite the feelings that I might be experiencing. That He who cared for me on the cross is still caring for me now, in the everyday nitty-gritty of life, and that I can trust Him with my past, and that I can trust Him with my future, and that I can trust Him with my present day. and I can trust Him when I'm 40 or today when I'm 45 and I can trust Him where He has placed me and I can trust Him for as long as He chooses to keep me where He has placed me. Now look, I understand that everybody's different. I'm not saying that you somehow have to have an experience like me. That's not the point. What I'm saying is this, that on the basis of also these verses in Ecclesiastes, You must strive to interpret your life and your midlife circumstances in terms of the sovereignty of God and His providence. And if you do that, then you might not ever even hit the bottom of the U-curve. Or if you do, you'll accelerate up it. Christ came to give us life, and life in abundance, including this life today. Problem of midlife is how we interpret things. And then the other thing we have to remember, as I mentioned, is that midlife is then also full of opportunity. The opportunity to love God, the opportunity to love your neighbor. You can take time, by all means take time to shed tears for your broken dreams and your missed opportunities. Take time and mourn the regrets and the what-ifs, the disappointments and the disillusions, the dissatisfactions. But you have to know that you are not stuck there. A Christian is never stuck in disillusion. It can happen and you might have to work through it, but you're not stuck there. Someone who has the Holy Spirit in their life is never stuck. Right? You're not stuck. God is sovereign, and he gives you responsibility and agency in life, and he gives you great opportunity in midlife. Not the opportunity to have a fair, or buy a convertible, or dress in fancy clothes. Much greater opportunities than all of that, as they're found in Ecclesiastes 3, verses 12 and 13, for instance. Look at verse 12. I perceive that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live. Midlife is an opportunity to be joyful. To be joyful in daily ways. To make the conscience choice every day when you get up. to say, this is the day that the Lord has made, and I will rejoice and be glad in it. And perhaps as you're struggling with disillusionment and disappointment, they make that statement every hour if you need be. the daily, hourly decision to look to heaven and say, Lord, rescue me from my idols, create in me a new heart, help me to say that this is the day the Lord has made, and I will rejoice in it. I will be glad in it. And that doesn't mean that you're supposed to be that midlife person who's always walking around, smiling and clapping their hands and always singing or something like that. That's not the point. It means acting even in small ways based on what you know, not based on what you feel. Alright? It means living your daily life in the daily grind of life based on what you know and not what you're currently feeling. To be joyful is to remind yourself of what Ecclesiastes 3 verse 11 says, that God has made everything beautiful in its time. Seek to live joyfully in the beauty of the time the Lord has given you. Imagine, for instance, you're looking through old photos in an old photo album. There's a couple of ways you could look at old photos. You can look at old photos with all of the midlife temptation of regret and self-pity. You can look through old photos and long for your youth and remember your missed opportunities and have your life full of regrets. You can look at a photo album like that. Or what you can do is you can open the photo album of your past and say, I choose joy. I know that the Lord in his sovereign providence has ordained my life to be as it is. And so I now have an opportunity to look at this and to look at these photos of my life, look down the road in the past at the pause in each one of them and live a life of gratitude for the things that the Lord has given me. And to remember things with joy and say, wow, what a blessed moment that was. Wow, what a blessed experience that was. The Lord indeed has been good to me. He has indeed made things beautiful in their time. And today I choose joy as I look back. Joy and gratitude. To look then backwards with joy and gratitude and then to look forward with joy and hope. to say that the Lord not only has worked beautiful things in my life in the past, but he's gonna work beautiful things in the future. He's not done with me yet. There are still things that lie ahead. And in verse 12, that comes out in these words, I perceive that there's nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they lead. Joy goes hand in hand with doing good. Joy goes hand in hand with doing good. And in midlife, you have an opportunity, brothers and sisters, to do good. When you're middle-aged, you've been around the block a couple of times. And so you've hopefully gained some wisdom and some experience in that. And you might feel sometimes like you're stagnating or, you know, people put you on the shelf. But actually, you've got things to share. And you've got things to do. You've accumulated some experience and some wisdom that you can now invest in the world around you and in other people. So live with joy and hope and be a force for positivity and good, godly good in the world. And you can do that now in ways that you could not do when you were younger. You can do that now in ways that you could not do that when you were younger. So take the opportunity to do good to others. That means things like this. Investing in meaningful relationships. Too many of us have these real superficial relationships, even with people that are really close to us. But invest in meaningful relationships where you will say, I will intentionally, with joy and hope, take this opportunity that God has given me to do good and to invest in other people in a positive, God-glorifying way that also contributes to their joy. Which means things like this. When you're young, so many young people, you get caught up in all of the social competition. where you compare yourself to other people, right? That happens so much. In midlife, if you make a conscious effort to say, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to reject and leave behind me all of that social competition, I'm gonna choose today, I'm gonna reject that, and instead I'm going to embrace a social connectedness where I might do good as I invest in other people's relationship. it might mean that you've got to go out and make some apologies and admit your sins in the way that you've hurt others and make amends and then go out and do good in the world and invest in people and make the world a better place rather than a worse place to do what is good you have an opportunity to do that by God's grace in midlife like perhaps you've never had the opportunity before Here's another thing we must understand, verse 13. Also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil, this is God's gift to man. I'm gonna read that again, okay? That everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil, this is God's gift to man. That means in terms of midlife, you have an opportunity to find enjoyment in your everyday life. And to do that in a way that leaves behind the arrogance and the clawing up the social or corporate ladder that might have characterized your younger years. To reject and leave that behind and enjoy the days of your life that the Lord has given you. To slow down Midlife is often an opportunity to say, I'm going to slow down in the middle of what can be a very busy life, and I'm going to smell the roses a little bit. What I'm going to do is I'm going to dial my focus down, and I'm going to learn to appreciate the things that the Lord by his providential hand has given me, the things that are often right under my nose that I haven't been paying attention to. Midlife can be an opportunity to enjoy the very small but the wonderful things about life. One of the things that I've discovered as I've been in midlife is that everything in creation, when you scratch at it a little bit, is absolutely awesome. If you give your attention to anything find that it's wonderful, that it's full of wonder and beauty and amazement, everything, and everybody. And so in midlife, You learn to enjoy, to eat and drink and find pleasure in your days. Which means, doesn't mean that you do your own midlife version of YOLO when you go off to do these extravagant things. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about dialing your attention to see the beauty and the gifts the Lord has given you in your everyday life. Things like the taste of a fresh local strawberry. The first sip of coffee in the morning. The singing of birds when you woke up. Dappled sunlight in the forest. The smell of rain on pavement. The fresh smell of clothes when they're just out of the dryer. There's beauty all around you. Enjoy it. The joy of helping a younger colleague succeed and advance. The joy, this one is a great one for me, the joy of telling the same joke you've told a million times, but having people laugh at it anyways. The joy of having just enough milk left in the fridge for your bowl of cereal. The joy of having a good hair day. The joy and satisfaction of a job well done. The joy of seeing children become adults. The joy when you peel the clementine and the peel comes off in one piece. The joy of cultivating a garden with God. The joy of seeing a customer satisfied. The pleasure in closing all the tabs on your computer at the end of the day. The joy of taking your shoes off after a long day. Of taking a long bath. The joy of a perfect shave. All of you bearded people don't know what I'm talking about. The joy of listening to your favorite song or knowing all the lines of your favorite movie. The joy of laugh lines on your face. The joy of inside jokes. The happiness of a house kept clean, of a yard neat and tidy, of a garage well organized. The joy of getting off work while the sun is still out. The joy of finding exactly what you were looking for the first time. The joy of the elevator arriving as soon as you push the button. The joy of planning and reminiscing about creation. The joy of a paddle in the water on a misty lake. The joy of the sound of children laughing. Is there anything better than that? The sound of your loved one's voice. You could go on and on. You could put it to song if you want. Rain drops on roses and whispers on kittens. Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. Brown paper packages tied up with strings. These are a few of my favorite things. You get the point, though? The point is, is that midlife is an occasion, an opportunity, along with Ecclesiastes to say, I'm going to open my eyes to the world around me like I haven't been doing perhaps in the busyness of my youth, and I'm going to take pleasure in everyday toil, and I'm going to enjoy all that God has given me in life right under my nose. Now, is this going to magically fix all of your midlife problems? Perhaps not. But brothers and sisters, it's going to make your life a whole lot better. And it's going to draw you in a biblical way closer to the life that Jesus Christ died on the cross to give you a life of abundance. Midlife can be a wonderful time. It can surely be a blessing. The statistics on the U-curve of life satisfaction show us it can also be challenging. So how are you going to live it? How are you going to live midlife? Today we've heard from God who says you ought to interpret everything through the sovereignty of God and his promise. That you must be willing to see that the Holy Spirit has given you opportunities to fight your disappointment and your disillusionment and your discouragement by being joyful. Fighting for joy and doing what is good and seeking and taking pleasure in the regular things of life. Chapter 3, verse 13 says that this, this is God's gift to you. Interpreting life in the sovereignty and providence of God, fighting for joy and taking the opportunity to seek pleasure in the everyday things of life is God's gift to you. And so the question then is, is will you take it? Will you receive this gift? Or will you shirk it off and refuse it? Will you receive it? And then think about this for a moment. This gift, also of midlife, comes to you in the nail-scarred hands of Christ. The nail-scarred hands of Christ. that you bled on the cross for the forgiveness of your sins, were also pierced so that you might live life in this way. For Christ came to give you life, and life in abundance. Will you receive the gift of God? I pray that you all will. Amen. Let's pray.