Sunday 09 • 29 • 19

We're gonna continue our sermon series this morning on the book of Ecclesiastes and this morning, we're looking at Ecclesiastes 2:18 through 26. We've been reading this together to help you stay awake and focused and to help all of us listen more actively to God's word. So let's read this together.

I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun. Seeing that 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 also is 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 has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow and his work is vexation. Even in the 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 a striving after wind. — Ecclesiastes 2:18-26

Let's pray. Lord God we ask that you would allow our hearts to hear your word this morning. That we would be changed and transformed by it, that we'd be encouraged even through Ecclesiastes which is largely viewed as a discouraging book. Lord, there is much encouragement for us here. So, lord, help us through the lens of Christ and his work to see it and help us to be transformed by it and be made more into his image. We pray this in Jesus name, Amen.

I have one reoccurring nightmare, only one. It's happened over and over and over again throughout my life. Usually happens when I have a fever and I'm sick. The first time it happened, I was in middle school. We were studying India in history class and I was out of school for about a week with some sort of middle school sickness. And I was starting to feel kind of stressed out by all the work that I needed to catch up on and I fell asleep and I had this dream.

Here's how it goes. Even telling you about it makes me tense. I'm in a dark cave and there's a light at the end of the cave. I walk towards the light and I look out and there's a vast desert, just dunes and dunes and dunes of sand. And then I start to hear feet and footsteps. And I turn around and behind me is Gandhi. We were studying India. Remember? He hands me some tweezers and he says count. That's the dream. Over and over again throughout my life, I have had that dream. It's not always Gandhi, sometimes it's different people. But the hopelessness of that dream, do you feel it? Do you feel the hopelessness of that dream just the idea of taking tweezers and counting grains of sand for what would feel like an eternity?

I feel the hopelessness of that dream often in life. I know you do too. I feel it when I clean my house. And then five seconds later, the tornado of five children moved through and I go, vanity, vanity. Right? My kids feel it. This week, my son Peter was drawing this beautiful picture of sunflowers, no doubt inspired by Vincent van Gogh. He's drawing these sunflowers and he taped these two pages together and the sunflowers kind of progressively got bigger and bigger and he spent like all morning working on this. And then his little sister, Marion, my two year old, took a marker and just went scribble. And Peter very calmly said, vanity, vanity. Now he screamed. Right? But that's—do you feel the hopelessness? Oftentimes, we feel the hopelessness of our labor.

We're in the study of Ecclesiastes. We're looking at the teachings of Kohelet, the teacher, right, probably Solomon. He's talking about how essentially all of life is vanity, hebble, which we've said could roughly be translated as vapor. It's vaporous. It doesn't have a lot of substance. And last week, Jeff took us through a smorgasbord of what he called pacifiers, right? Things in life that have some meaning to them, but there aren't of ultimate purpose. They're pacifiers. Right? And one of those pacifiers was work, and he promised we would talk more about it today. And here we are.

So this morning, I want to look at three things. First, does work really work? Number two, I want to look at how work works as a sign. Number three, I want to look at how work works as a gift. Okay. Does work really work? Work works as a sign and work works as a gift. So first of all, does work really work?

First thing I want to acknowledge is that it's easy for us, especially in America, in Raleigh, North Carolina where probably most of us live because we found a job here. A lot of you are here because of some sort of employment, right? That's Raleigh's big thing. We have the Research Triangle Park. We have jobs here. We don't have mountains. We don't really have any kind of bodies of water, but you can get a job here and we have some parks. It's a good place to raise a family and get a job. So there's a sense in which we can read this and just see: hey, what he's talking about here is our employment. And to be sure, that's a big part of what he's talking about. But I want to suggest that the toil that he mentions here isn't just your job. It's not just your employment. It's not just even your role. It's all of the work that you do in life. I would call it adulting. Do you ever think about how much work it takes to be an adult? Like when you're a kid, you have some work, but then you get to grown-up level and you realize, holy cow, all of this takes so much effort.

My family were planning a trip to Walt Disney World in November. My parents have very graciously offered to pay for it. They said, "Hey, we'll pay for it if you'll plan it." Let me tell you, I am a part-time pastor and full-time Disney vacation planner right now. Planning a trip to Walt Disney World is the most involved thing. When I was a kid, I thought you just went. Maybe when I was a kid it was a little bit more like that, but now what you have to do is call and make your reservation for your hotel. You need to evaluate whether you want to be on a resort hotel or off-site. There's benefits to the resort. Which one do you want to stay at? Which one's closer to the parks? How long is it going to take you to get there? Which one has the best pool? You've got to think about all of this stuff. Then you have to book it. Once you've booked that, you have to make your dining reservations at the park because if you don't make your dining reservations while you're at the park, you're going to be waiting in line to get food instead of waiting in line to get in the rides, which is really the important thing. And you've got to make sure that your kids are having fun nonstop twenty-four-seven as soon as they get there because Disney World is the happiest place on earth. Also, about sixty days before you go—and I just did this on Thursday—you can book your FastPass pluses, which will allow you to forego the line once you get to Disney World. You've got to do that. Book them all in the morning so you can book some more later in the afternoon while you're at the park.

Do you get where I'm going? I don't know how I show up at Walt Disney World and the minute that one kid goes, "I didn't want to ride this ride. I wanted to ride this one," without blowing up and going, "Do you know how much work I have done to make you happy?"

There's an invisible reality to toil that goes beyond our jobs. I could talk about the invisible work of Katie Sutton, the mom who manages a household of seven, and it is incredible. Even I don't see all of it. But often times I catch a glimpse of all of the work that she does and I'm amazed by that woman. Some of you are like that. My wife also works full time. So sometimes there's an invisible quality to the work that I do at home that sometimes I wonder if she or anyone else sees, but there is a lot of work that goes into living life. There is a lot of toil and a lot of work in our jobs, in our employment.

A lot of times, that is where we go and think about all the toil, all the work that we do in terms of the things that we're trying to accomplish. What are we trying to accomplish with all of this toil? There are several things that we could talk about, but among them, we're trying to provide—trying to put food on the table, put a roof over our heads. That's something that we're striving for. That's something that we feel like we need to accomplish. We're trying to create some status often with our work. We're trying to accomplish something that people will talk about. We'll make a name for ourselves. We're trying often—for some of us, we're working for the weekend. My Disney planning, all of the stress of that, man, it better just be fun. I'm willing to sacrifice a lot of time and energy in order to make sure my kids are happy. A lot of us do that. A lot of us work. The money that we make, we're just trying to work for whatever kind of pleasures or joys or fun that we see on the other side of it. Some of us, let's be fair.

Some of us are trying to do something meaningful with our lives, right? We're trying not to just let life pass us by without doing anything that improves the world in some way. We're trying not to let our life pass us by as parents without actually doing the meaningful work of loving our children. We're trying to not let the world pass us by without doing something meaningful for God, right? To expand His kingdom.

Honestly, Katie and I talk a lot about this. Both of our jobs have meaning and purpose that goes beyond the immediacy of it. What we're trying to do in what she's working and how I'm working is we're trying to bring glory to God, and both of us in our different ways are doing that. It's not just pastors who are expanding God's kingdom. We both work tirelessly at our jobs and in our home for the glory of God. So there's a lot of meaningful pursuits in our labor. And in fact, God made us for work. There's nothing wrong with work. There's nothing bad about it.

All of these pursuits are things that Solomon would have been well acquainted with. I think it's easy to just kind of think about Solomon as a king, right? Picture him on a chaise lounge with somebody with a palm branch, sipping whatever. And I'm sure that there were some aspects of Solomon's life that were like that. He did have a lot of wealth and he had a lot of servants. So there probably were some really enjoyable aspects of his life. But I would submit to you that being king of a country and running it well as he did probably took a lot of effort.

There's a lot of stories about Solomon's wisdom and how he exercised that as a judge, ruling and caring for the people that came to him with questions. There was a lot of Solomon's life that was consultant-like, right? People came from all over the world to ask him questions and gain his wisdom. That probably got annoying. But there was a lot that he did, a lot of work. He also built the temple of the living and true God. He built God's house. So he did a lot of work during his lifetime, and a lot of it you can see kind of some of the same pursuits and goals that we have in our work.

Did he want to put food on the table and did he accomplish that? Yeah, he did. He was prosperous, rich beyond our wildest dreams. Did he have status? Oh, yeah. World renowned. Did he work for the weekend? Sure he did. Those pleasures that he had probably far exceeded anything that we could achieve. Did he do meaningful work? He built the temple. He served his people well. He had a family. 700 wives? That's pretty impressive. But the Bible only mentions three kids, so I got him there. Probably had more than that though if he had 700 wives and 300 concubines, but we won't get into that.

All the point is, when he talks about all of labor being vapor, right? He's not just talking about something small. He's talking about a substantial life of work and the pursuit of different goals and different achievements that probably will exceed anything that anyone in this room will accomplish. And so when he says that it is all vapor, was he right?

Did the food on the table eventually fade? Yeah. When he talks about being wise and not knowing who's going to come after you—like all the stuff that you earn—it may just go to the next person in line who's a fool. Solomon's son was kind of a fool and led to the split of the kingdom. Prosperity plummeted in Israel following Solomon's rule and would decline increasingly until the nation was carried off.

Status? Same thing. The notoriety of the king of Israel would probably never reach the peak that it had under Solomon. Pleasures? They stopped. The meaningful nature of his work? Even the temple was torn down and destroyed.

So if you look at Solomon for all of his achievements, all of the things that he pursued, he's right. All of it was vapor. And it's true of us too. All of the things that we strive for in our work, all of the toil that we labor after—it will eventually vaporize because all of our labor, all of our work is not ultimate.

Courage

You know, our men's group is watching a video series on Thursday mornings on courage. It's encouraging men to be courageous in their lives and their pursuits, right? And one of the things that's interesting about the videos—there's all these different famous pastors who are quoted in the video. At one point we're watching the video and I'm going, yeah, yeah, yeah. Courage takes courage to have faith. It takes courage to love your wife. It takes courage to raise your family.

I got it. You gotta trust in Jesus to give you that courage and move responsibly into all this stuff. I get all of this. I get this video and then Joshua Harris pops up in the video. You know who Josh Harris is? He wrote a book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, came out while I was in college, led to a lot of breakups. Actually had a seminary class with him while I was at RTS. Got to meet him and I told him that. At that point, he had kind of recanted that book and he kind of said he was a little extreme but more famously and recently, he walked away from the faith and he walked away from his wife.

And what was funny is in this video, he's saying, "Men, you need to put your faith in Christ and be courageous. It takes courage to believe in Jesus and it takes courage to love your wife." And that was so sobering to me because I realized, man, I thought I had all of this. I thought I got it. I thought I had done the work of figuring out what it looked like to live a life of courage and that was a real stark wake up call, a reminder to me that any of that could vaporize in a moment.

What Solomon Is Teaching

What is Solomon trying to teach us here? Well, here's what he's not trying to teach us. He's not trying to teach us that work is bad or that it isn't important or that you shouldn't work hard or for things that matter. I'm going to come back to this point later but I want you to understand that is not what he's saying. He is not saying, "Forsake work, go for the life of leisure, just let it happen." That's not what he's saying.

What he is saying is reject workaholicism, right? If you pursue that, it will produce despair. If work is your ultimate, it will not serve you ultimately because it will be gone. He's saying don't buy the lies of Satan, which is this: "You can do it. If you just work harder, you can do it. You can achieve it. You can be like god, right?" That was the lie of the serpent. "Take the fruit. Do it. You can do it."

Satan is in some ways our biggest cheerleader when we are working for our own ultimate and not for the ultimate that we find in God. So that's what Solomon's trying to teach us. Don't buy that lie. If you buy that lie, you will be miserable. Everything that you have will go away and will be given to those who love God.

Instead, relax and remember, you're not as important as you think you are. That is, in some ways, kind of depressing but it also is incredibly encouraging, right?

A Message for Every Generation

Think about this. Let me just paint with some broad brushes. I'll use some generations to paint this.

Millennials: You guys are fighting. You're fighting to get jobs. You're trying to get them from the baby boomers who refuse to retire, right? And the jobs that you got, they are just not as important as you thought they were going to be right out of college, right? And you're looking on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and I don't know what it is. I'm still on Facebook. I know I'm a dinosaur, right? You're looking on whatever, right? And you're seeing other people having these amazing jobs. They're doing it and you think, "Man, I'm being left behind. I gotta get it. I gotta do it."

You can do it right now. It's okay. Relax. You'll get there. First of all, you are not your job and you are not as important as you think you are. Let Jesus be important and just relax.

Gen X: It's us, right? The rebels with our cut off jean jackets or whatever. Guns and Roses, right? We're in the pinch. Midlife, right? We're starting to wonder if our career choices were really the right ones. Was it worth it? We're dealing often with many of us with family dynamics. And so it feels like, "Man, I'm not able to be as productive as I once was when I didn't have five kids." Right? Relax. You're not as important as you think you are. You can't do it. Just hang in there. Do what you can. Trust in Jesus.

Baby Boomers: Retirement is sneaking up. You need to make room for the millennials, right? But your 401ks isn't what you hoped it would be, right? So what are you going to do? The stress of how you're going to make it is facing you, right? There's also the "What is my life's meaning if I'm not working?" right? That's all real but guess what? Relax. You're not as important as you think you are. God will provide for you in your retirement years just as he's provided for you in the rest of your life. You're not that important. You can't do it. It's not up to you.

That's the encouragement of Solomon.

Jesus as Ultimate Teacher

Jesus had some great teaching on this. Let's look at our second point which is work as a sign. He gets into this. If you haven't figured it out yet, we're doing Ecclesiastes but we're also doing John's gospel and we're kind of bouncing back and forth and we're looking at Jesus as kind of like the ultimate teacher, the ultimate fulfillment of Kohelet.

So let's look at Jesus' teachings in John 6:27-35. Listen to this.

Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures to eternal life which the Son of God or Son of Man will give you. For on him, God the Father has set his seal. — John 6:27

Then they said to him, "What must we do to be doing the works of God?" Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God that you believe in him who he has sent."

So they said to him, then what sign do you do that we may see and believe you? What works do you perform? Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness as it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat. Jesus then said to them, truly, truly I say to you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven for the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. They said to him, Sir, give us this bread always. And Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger and whoever believes in me shall never thirst. — John 6:30-35

Alright, quickly. Let's draw out some things from here. First of all, notice what is the work of the kingdom? What must we do to be doing the works of God? And Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God that you believe in him who he has sent."

Wouldn't we love it if Jesus had said, "Well, you do this and this and this and this and this and then you go to heaven"? Because then our work would work. We would be able to achieve it on our own. We could buy the lie of Satan and we could be like God. But Jesus doesn't give them that option. He says, "Hey, your work will not work. Your work is to believe in me and my work because my work is ultimate. Your work is perishable. My work is imperishable." Do you see what he's saying there?

And then secondly, they say, "Jesus, we want a sign." I love this part. I love this part because it's so funny. And just to illustrate it, I bought a new t-shirt this last week. I got this new t-shirt. I've been walking around with it. And 80%, 90% of the people that have seen it do not get it. Does anybody get it? Yes, yes. It's "Comma comma comma comma comma chameleon." Those of you who didn't experience the eighties, you have no frame of reference. It's a Culture Club song. I have mixed feelings about how you all wanted to sing that song.

But so at Home Depot, I was checking out and this woman was like, "Oh hey, I love your shirt. My son has one of those dragon things." This is like this passage where people say, "Jesus, give us a sign, right?" And what's ironic is in John chapter 6, he had just fed 5,000 people with a couple loaves and fishes. He had just walked on water right before this section. So it's like, "Jesus, give us a sign. Where's the sign?"

And then what's even more ironic is that they bring up manna. Manna is the sign that we used to have, Jesus. Remember, manna, right? They were wandering in the desert and they didn't have any food and God miraculously just rained down bread from heaven and they picked it up and they ate it. The deal with the manna is you could get enough for one day and then it would go bad unless it was the day before the Sabbath and that would last two days. Bottom line is you couldn't hoard it. It was something that pointed to your dependency upon God.

They pointed that as the old sign and Jesus says, "You know what's funny, guys? Not only did you miss the miracles that I just did but you missed that that sign really points to me. I'm the bread of life. I'm the sustenance that comes, that is delivered to you daily, that allows you to live. I'm that. That's a sign that points to me."

Your Work as a Sign

Brothers and sisters, I want you to understand, your work only works as a sign. Like the manna, like the miracles that Jesus did, your work is a sign that points you to him. Here's how it does that in two ways.

One, in all of your failures. Right? You can't collect enough manna to keep on going past one day. You have limitations. You can't achieve all of your hopes and dreams. You cannot accomplish everything. You cannot earn your salvation. You cannot do it. You have to depend on Jesus. Your work in all of your failures and all of your limitations points you to Christ.

Also, your work points you to Christ because you have this beautiful, amazing, unexplainable ambition. You have the audacity to think that something is going to happen through you. Do you understand how counter-cultural that is?

You are supposed to be a bunch of molecules that randomly came together as the result of billions of years of random evolutionary process that has no point other than survival and yet, you want to love other people, you want to expand God's kingdom, you inexplicably want to do something great. And that brings me to my final point, which is work works as a gift.

If Christ did all of the work for us, it would be tempting to say simply, "Hey, it's all done, right? Jesus said it was finished and so am I. Turn on some ESPN, sit back, and relax." That, as I said, is not what Solomon was saying and it's also not what Jesus was saying.

Let me just review some things. Solomon in Proverbs says:

Idle hands bring poverty — Proverbs 10

And the inverse:

Hard work brings prosperity — Proverbs 14:23

And in case you thought that after Jesus came, all of that changed, Paul says:

He who does not work does not eat — 2 Thessalonians

So don't go thinking, "Hey, Jesus did all this work. So I don't need to keep working." Because you need to keep working. Some of you need to hear that. Most of you are very busy professionals. You're working way more probably than you should, but there are a couple of you that need to hear that your work is a gift. Don't let it pass you by. It's an opportunity.

Listen to the end of Ecclesiastes:

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. It's a gift. For apart from him who can eat or have enjoyment. For to the one who pleases him, God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy — Ecclesiastes 2

That's a gift, brothers and sisters. We have the dignity of individual callings that God has given us, and we get to work and enjoy our work—not take ourselves too seriously, not overindulge in work, but we get to enjoy it and it brings about things that are good.

You know what's miraculous? It's not that God feeds us from heaven, but that he feeds us from Earth. It's amazing that God is able to do anything good through us and the work that produces good things that you have—that is a gift from God to be enjoyed. A miracle, just like the manna. So every day when you get up in the morning and you go off to work, do you think about that? God has provided purpose and meaning and a way for me to provide. It's a gift. It's amazing.

And don't go thinking that your work has a limited purpose. God is going to do more in and through your work than you can possibly imagine. I want you to think about this. The feeding of the 5,000. There was a boy who did some fishing that morning and who brought along some bread, and Jesus took his work and used it to feed 5,000 people. What's he going to do with your work?

If our work is vapor, the amazing thing about Christ's work is that he does what our work could never do. If what we're striving at is vapor, the more you work, the more it dissipates. But the amazing thing about Christ's work is that his work gives substance to our vapor. He takes what you're doing and he uses it in ways that you could never even imagine.

Application Points

I want to hit you with a couple of real quick application points. Write these down. I want you to think about these this week.

Number one: Commit your toil to the Lord. You are not slaves. You do not work for your boss. You do not work for your sin. You work for the Lord God, your Father who loves you. Go about your work as though you work for him. You work for the one who completed work for your behalf. Allow that to soak into your heart.

Secondly: Work with humility. It's not about you or what you're able to accomplish. If you're overwhelmed, maybe you're not called to do all the things that you're doing. Maybe you need to think about letting some of those go, letting someone else do them because it's not up to you to pull all of it off. You can be humble. You can be open-handed with your work. When you face job changes and situational changes in your life where your roles are shifting, allow that your goals, your vision for what was going on was ultimate. That ultimately, it's God's and you can be open-handed with that. Embrace your boundaries. Embrace your limitations.

Thirdly: Work with confidence. God is going to use what you do. You ever go to work and wonder, "What am I doing? What is this accomplishing?" Think about the boy with the fish and the loaves.

I guarantee you, he didn't go to hear Jesus thinking, "Hey, God's going to multiply my loaves and fishes and feed 5,000 people as a sign to remind everybody that all of the signs really point to him and he's the ultimate satisfaction and then he's going to complete all of our work and make our work really substantive." There's something that you're doing in your job that God has purpose for. You might not see it, but he's up to it. He's working through you. So work with confidence.

Fourthly, work with patience. You're not always going to see how he works and he might not work quickly. It might take some time. You may need to be obedient and faithful for a long period of time before any of it comes to any kind of realization. It may just look like vapor because it is vapor in this life and you might not see its substance until we get to heaven. So work patiently.

And finally, work with joy. Your job is a gift, not a curse. Whatever your toil is this week, try to approach it with joy, remembering that God is at work, that it's not up to you. You can relax. You're not as important as you think you are. Remember your toil is a manna-like sign and reminder of Christ's completed toil, that he is through your work revealing himself to a watching world.

You know how the story ends of your work?

For those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. — Romans 8:28

Brothers and sisters, your work in and of itself does not work, but it works as a sign and it works as a gift, and God works all things for your good.

You know what I think of? That dream I have about the sands and then I think about the dream that is heaven where we will go. We might be standing at the mouth of a cave or wherever, but Jesus will come to us and he will say, "No more tears. Keep your eyes from weeping, for your work will be rewarded. Well done, my good and faithful servants. Enter into your rest."

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.