We will be hearing from Ecclesiastes 4–5 this weekend. I imagine that you haven’t heard a sermon from that passage for a while. Ecclesiastes fits into the category of what the people of Israel called “wisdom literature.” Passages like Genesis 1–2 tell us what God is like. Much of the Old Testament reports the history of God’s work or the messages of his prophets. Still other passages, such as the Psalms, describe the vast experiences and emotions that come from seeking to live by faith with God in this imperfect world. .
But wisdom literature is different. It focuses on the very practical issue of what life looks like when we live as the Creator created us to live. Wisdom is rooted in the fact that human beings are made in God’s image and therefore are meant to reflect God’s ways through our thoughts, words, and acts. Wisdom literature teaches us how God’s character should be reflected in our marriages, our families, our work, our resources…
At LAC, we are currently in the midst of a series of messages entitled Don’t Waste Your Life—and I think that we all need God’s wisdom. (Don’t you?) We need to know how our Creator created us to use our time, talents, and treasures. This weekend, we will learn how not to use them. From Ecclesiastes, we will discover paths that will surely lead to messing up our lives. Have you ever heard a sermon teaching that? This may be a first.
The writer of Ecclesiastes—who could have been King Solomon (so let's just say that he wrote it)—engaged in an intriguing research project. Solomon put the philosophies of life that most people in his day held to the test. He wanted to discover whether usual human claims about how to live well really make sense. Unfortunately, to his distress, he told us in this book that the things most people live for are not worth living for. The recurring phrase running through the book of Ecclesiastes is "meaningless"—everything that most people live for is meaningless. We'll see this weekend how three people go down the wrong path, thinking that they'll find life but missing it altogether.
So, we'll all learn how to go about wasting our lives. And we'll also hear God's Word point us in Ecclesiastes 5:18–20 to a much better way. My prayer is that we all will learn how to "find satisfaction," to receive every moment of life as "a gift from God" and to "be filled with gladness of heart" as we live lives of active faith in the God in whose image we are made.
To His Glory,
Dr. Greg Waybright
Senior Pastor
