15Oct 2011 Ecclesiastes 12:1

¹Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, “I find no pleasure in them”—

We all need a goal in life, a goal worthy of a life. This goal will cost you your life. Everything you have and are will be spent in attaining this goal, so make it a good one. That does not mean there won’t be some smaller goals along the way, but we all need a really big goal or life is not really worth living. I have some friends who like to target shoot. They have targets of different distances from their firing position. It is easiest to hit all the targets if they are all in the same direction, not having to constantly get yourself repositioned between shots. When they are all in the same direction you can simply make the fine adjustment and aim at the next target. The same is true in life. When all your goals are in the same direction, it is easier to obtain them; each goal supports the accomplishment of all the others. Being a successful and faithful husband supports raising healthy, confident children. Having a stable family supports success in career endeavors. That is why the author of our passage today tells his readers to remember the LORD in the days of their youth. In essence he is saying, get a good target and stay focused on it all your life. So, what are your BIG goals in life? Are they really worth obtaining? Are they worth dying for? If not, they are not worth living for.

14Oct 2011 Ecclesiastes 11:9

⁹Be happy, young man, while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know that for all these things God will bring you judgment.

Here is the bottom line: we will give an account for all our actions, so when we act, we need to keep this accountability in mind. The exuberance of youth is normal, but even in the exuberance, keep an eye to eternity. While my wife and I were dating, one thing kept us on the right path. We wanted to be able to say to our future children that they could do anything their mother and I did while we were dating, and know that they would not go too far. This potential future conversation with as yet unborn children guided our actions in the present moment. The future anchored and guided our present, and likewise our present choices secured our future. There is a sense of connection between present and future. We hear the connection between past and present so often in the Scriptures. The recounting of God’s faithfulness and deliverance is told repeatedly in the pages of Scripture. But we often miss the connection created between the present and the future, our actions being brought under the watchful eye of our Lord. So today, as you make choices, begin to make them in the knowledge that someday all will be brought into the light, and we will all have to give an account of our stewardship of the life we were given.

13Oct 2011 Ecclesiastes 10:14b

^14bNo one knows what is coming—who can tell him what will happen after him?

I love the movie Forest Gump. He seems to stumble into success. He has no idea what will happen next, or why. He just lives life, giving to others, without thought of himself. He survives a hurricane by being fool-hearty. He buys some stock in a fruit company, Apple, and gets rich. He bulldozes a house because the woman he loves throws stones at it and cries. Sometimes we are so foolish to think that we know the future. We can know the ultimate future with certainty, the next weeks can be very difficult. Will the Euro survive? Will we muster the political will to stop spending ourselves out of existence? Will our spouse return? Will our kids ever respect us? Will I be able to stop comfort eating? Will they find a cure in time? We just don’t know the future. All we have control over is this present moment, and we can’t control the outside forces that might interrupt our present moment. This is what Solomon is discovering and sharing with us. The person who is always living solely for tomorrow, trying to control its direction, will soon find themselves on the wrong path of time. Things will not always go the way we want them to go.

12Oct 2011 Ecclesiastes 9:11

¹¹I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.

Sometimes things just don’t seem fare. You would expect the swift, the strong, the wise, the brilliant, and the learned to have an advantage in this life. Sometimes they do, but as this verse says, bad things happen to good people. Being any of these things does not guarantee success or protection from evil. Time and chance happen to them all. There is not anti-aging miracle pill, or diet, or meditation. Some things happen in this life that cause us to question. That is because our knowledge is limited to this life “under the sun.” If your only point of reference is what you know, and see, and taste and touch, then your knowledge is very limited. Even the most brilliant person on the planet knows only a small fraction of all there is to know. And even all they know is limited to “under the sun.” What about the things of God’s realm? What about the realities of the structure of the universe? What do we actually know about that? With the recent news of a particle that might go faster than the speed of light, everything we know about the structure of the universe could be put into question. But that is because our knowledge is limited by only knowing the things apart from God. The LORD knows exactly how all the particles of the universe interact. He wrote the laws that govern them. So when the swift or the strong fall victim to life “under the sun”, we should not be surprised; we too will fall victim to time and chance.

11Oct 2011 Ecclesiastes 8:11

¹¹When the sentence for a crime is not quickly carried out, the hearts of the people are filled with schemes to do wrong.

When I hear about people being on death row for 20 years, I think of this verse. When I hear of TV and internet for prisoners, college education and full healthcare, my blood boils. I think about the victims. Where is their internet and medical care? Justice is so slow, that many people wonder if justice ever happens in our system. I would contend that it is almost impossible to have justice here on this earth. Even when someone is executed for murder, justice does not bring the loved one back. But what really gets under my skin is the length of time it takes to get justice. Not all lawyers are evil, but sometimes the appeals process can get a bit carried away. When things drag on for years, people on the outside might be inclined to say, “Even if I get caught, they won’t kill me right away. I will have many more years of life, and life where all my physical needs are met at someone else’s expense.” Swift justice helps both the victim and the perpetrator. It helps society at large as well. There is a collective sigh of relief when justice gets served. People are less inclined to break the law when they know justice will be swiftly carried out. People currently can rightly claim that since sentencing takes so long and the chances of getting caught and convicted are low, crime is worth the risk. So many people get off because of some technicality. They get caught with blood on their hands, but because the paperwork doesn’t have the required signatures the blood evidence is thrown out as inadmissible. Some things just aren’t fair.

10Oct 2011 Ecclesiastes 7:29

²⁹This only have I found: God made mankind upright, but men have gone in search of many schemes.

The way to find fulfillment is easy and straightforward, and yet most avoid its simple message. We want to discover some new way to be happy, some new way to find peace. So we are constantly trying new things. This is especially true for younger people. But all the newness wears off, and we are back on the search. We see this in relationships and cars, and just about every other outward pursuit. We also see it in the quest for meaning. When we go through dry spells, we search for some new way to ‘fill up’ our spiritual tank. We read new books, watch a DVD or two, we buy a knickknack and hope it will work. Rarely do we go back to the spiritual disciplines that have sustained millions over the millennia. The list is simple: God’s Word, communication with Him, stewardship of life and wealth, and connection to a Body. We don’t need something new. One of the strange things about Americans is our love of food. And we seem to want such a large variety. We have restaurants of every imaginable westernized food. And we keep searching for more. And of course this comfort food negatively effects our waistlines! May I suggest that a regular diet of the spiritual basics will produce the long term benefits you seek. It might not be the most exciting ride, but it will produce the results that you want.