Enjoy Your Life

My name is Gina, and I've called the summit home for five years. Today, we will be reading from Ecclesiastes 3. 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 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 heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I have perceived that there is nothing better for them to be then to be joyful, and to do good as long as they live. Also, that everyone should eat, and drink, and take pleasure in all his toil.

This is God's gift to man. This is the word of God, for the people of God. You may be seated. - Ecclesiastes chapter three, one of the things that I hate the most is trying to assemble a piece of furniture that I bought online. Amen to that. You dump all the pieces, you stare at the instructions, trying to figure out if somebody for whom English was their first language, or any language, wrote those instructions, and just wondering, five minutes in, I'm wondering how much money that I actually saved doing it this way. I will spend an hour trying to figure out what the difference is between pole B and pole C, 'cause they look exactly alike to me, and why there are so many extra screws. And inevitably, when I'm almost finished, I will realize that I have put some piece on backwards, and I will have to disassemble the whole thing and put it all back together. Anybody else have this problem? That is exactly how the teacher, Ecclesiastes, feels about his life. He's looking around at all the pieces, the joys, the tragedies, the injustices, the unanswered questions, and he is asking, how does any of this fit together? I don't know anybody who has any age on them who understands how all the pieces of their lives fit. We all have these mysterious chapters,

things that seem painful and pointless and impossible to explain. And we wonder if there really is a good sovereign God directing all of this, why doesn't he show up more often? Why doesn't any of this make sense? In the 1980s, there was a Jewish rabbi named Harold Kushner, who wrote a New York Times best-selling book called "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." It was prompted by the tragic and untimely death of his teenage son. It became a classic book in our culture, one that's still referenced down to this day. In this book, Rabbi Kushner reasoned after the death of his son that God had to either be in his reasoning, had to be loving enough to want to stop the pain and yet powerless to do so. Or he said, the only other alternative is God is powerful enough to stop the pain, but just didn't care enough to bother himself with our problems. Well, that last option didn't seem right. Rabbi Kushner said he could not believe in an uncaring God. And so he concluded that God had created a world that he was somehow now incapable of intervening in. Ecclesiastes 3 provides a fundamentally different answer to that dilemma. I should add that Ecclesiastes 3 one through eight is one of the most recognized passages in the Bible. In fact, for some of you, it was all you could do

to when we were reading it, not start singing at the end, right? Ecclesiastes 3, 1 through 8 is a popular passage that people will sometimes read at funerals, even for people who are not Christians. These eight verses are a poem about the cyclical nature of life. For all of us, whether we are Christians or not, life unfolds in seasons. Some are good, some are bad. There's a time for birth, there's a time for death. There's a time to laugh and a time to weep. There's a time to build up and a time to tear down. All told in these eight verses, Solomon is gonna give us 14 of these dualistic pairs or two sets of seven, which is a Hebrew way of signaling perfection, completion. In other words, the very shape of the poem is declaring to you, this is the totality of life. The seasons, the cycles, this is life. And just like the actual seasons, none of us can change or predict or control them. Listen, I love the fall here in North Carolina. It literally cannot get here soon enough for me. The temperature is perfect, the leaves start to change, and there is no pollen. Spring is okay, okay, it's okay. The pollen just about ruins it for me. These muggy, humid summer months are something I could forever leave behind. Now, my wife is almost the exact opposite.

But of course, our preferences don't change anything in regards to when the seasons come or how long they last. In the same way, all the money in the world cannot stop life's biggest changes, your body aging, your kids growing up, things in your life changing, friends moving away, relationships falling apart, economies crashing, prostates developing cancer, a loved one dying. Money can do a lot. It can do a lot, but it cannot change or alter the biggest seasons of life. This is life. You parents know what it's like to talk with one of your kids, and they're complaining about something unfortunate happening to them or something unfair. And what do we sometimes say, parents? We say, well, kid, that's just life. When we say that, we're simply summarizing Ecclesiastes 3, one through eight. In fact, this poem expresses that word picture that I gave you last week that I told you I came up with as I was reading through Ecclesiastes earlier in the year. I said, imagine life as if you were sitting on a beach. And on some days, the ocean that you're sitting in front of brings you good, pleasant waves. And on other days, it brings you big, angry waves. There's nowhere else you can go. You have to stay on the beach. There's nothing you can do to change, predict, or control what that ocean brings.

The ocean is too vast, too uncontrollable for you to predict anything. So you might as well enjoy the days of good waves to the fullest because you can't bottle them up and save them for later. And on the bad days, you should pray for strength to endure them and thank God that they don't last forever either. Verses one through eight are an encapsulation of our lives, but sadly, sadly, whenever this poem is read at funerals or sung by hit bands in the 1960s, people usually stop at verse eight. And that is tragic because, you see, verses nine through 22 explain and interpret the poem of verses one through eight. Because life goes in cycles and in seasons for all of us, the teacher says. And because none of us can control, change, avoid, or hold onto those seasons, he asks, what gain has the worker from his toil? Remember, this is the guiding question of the book of Ecclesiastes. What gain is there? What permanence is there? What can you hold on to in the midst of a life you cannot control or hang on to? So for the next 13 verses, Solomon gives us counsel on how we can make sense of such a life. I'm gonna give you three pegs that Solomon organizes his counsel around. In these 13 verses, they're usually signified by Solomon

saying, I perceive this or I concluded this. The first peg is in verse 11. He says, I've got a trust and a redeeming God with a beautiful plan. Look at verse 11. God, he says, has made everything beautiful. Look at this in its time. The teacher says that with all these pieces, all these disparate pieces, all these seemingly disconnected strands, he said, there is a good God that you likely are unable to see yet. You may look at your life and feel like it's a bunch of random hardware and that there is no difference between Paul B and Paul C, but God knows what he's doing. Tim Keller said that life sometimes feels like we're walking in the midst of shrubbery, like you're walking through a garden, and somebody standing on top of a building tells you that the shrubbery that you're walking among actually forms part of a word, but you don't know what the word is, and you can't even tell what letter you're in. History only makes sense, Keller says, from the perspective of the air, from the perspective of eternity. Wisdom, listen to this, wisdom doesn't mean grasping how life always makes sense. Wisdom is trusting that God makes sense

even when life does it. You see, look at verse 11, look at the next part of it. Also, he has put eternity in the man's heart. Yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. In other words, there are some things you will not understand until you have the perspective of eternity. Is that so hard to believe? I mean, ask yourself, how many of you, how many of you right now can look back at some season of your life where you really wanted God to do something, you were praying for him to change something in your life and you prayed and it seemed right and you were sure of it and your friends were praying, but God didn't change it. And at the time, you just could not understand it, but now in your older age, from a wiser perspective, now you're actually grateful that he didn't change that thing you wanted him to change because now you can see the good that he produced in you through it. Raise your hands if you have at least one of those in your life right now. Y'all, both hands of mind are raised 'cause I got a bazillion of those things. Things I did not want to go through, seasons I would have preferred to avoid, seasons where I prayed that God would take me

out of them immediately, but now, now I see how God was at work in those seasons and I see the good that came through them. And in one sense, I would never want to go through them again, but in another, I wouldn't trade them for the world. Turns out that great theologian in the 1990s, Garth Brooks was right all along. We can all thank God for unanswered prayers, amen? You see, we all recognize that the most beautiful, rich stories, they require chapters of pain. Y'all, even Hollywood understands this. I mean, think about it, in the best movies, in your favorite movies, the hero usually has to go through something terrible, something they never wanted. And yet the things that he or she learns through that tragedy makes him or her so much richer, so much deeper, so much better of a character in the end. Spider-Man has to lose Aunt May or Uncle Ben or MJ or somebody, all right, make up your mind, Marvel writers, but it's only through that loss that Spider-Man learns that love requires sacrifice and that mercy, though it's much harder, is ultimately better than revenge. Already, you can see how God has done that with some of the painful things in your life. Ecclesiastes asks, if already, with only a little bit of time and perspective, you can see some of the good things God brought through pain, don't you think, given the perspective of eternity, you will see the reason for all of it. Look at verse 11, Jesus says,

some things are not gonna be discovered until eternity. You know, it's really interesting. Revelation says in heaven, Jesus will wipe away every tear from our eyes. That's an amazing promise, but you know what it means? It means we enter heaven with tears. You enter heaven still with tears of things that don't make sense, and in that moment, from the perspective of eternity into the power of the resurrection, you're gonna better understand because eternity and the resurrection heals every broken heart. Now listen, I know, I know because I talk to you. I know that some of you struggle to trust God with chapters you can't see any purpose for. That's what Rabbi Kushner struggled with. By the way, philosophers and thinkers have given this problem a name. They call it the problem of evil. It's the number one reason people lose their faith. People have talked about this problem for all of recorded human history. In fact, the classic version of the problem was put forward by the Greek philosopher Epicurus in the fifth century BC, then it goes like this. Epicurus reason, if God is all loving, He would want to eliminate evil. If God is all powerful, He would be able to eliminate evil. Therefore, either God is not all loving or he's not all powerful.

And at first glance, I will admit to you, that feels airtight. And yet, and yet, I've told you, there is a crucial missing premise in that argument, isn't there? You see, the argument assumes that if God is all loving and all powerful, that you and I would always be able to perceive what his love and power look like in action. But why would we assume that? I mean, a God who is infinitely loving and infinitely powerful would also be infinitely wise. And just think about it. If God's wisdom is as far above mine as his power is beyond mine, why does it surprise me that a lot of what he's doing is simply beyond my grasp, but understand, at least for the time being? Let me just think for a minute. Do a mental experiment about how much greater God's power is than yours. One of the stars in the night sky, one of the stars in the night sky we look at every night is U.I. Scooty, which by the way, coolest name for a star ever, right? U.I. Scooty sounds more like a rapper name than a star name. If I ever become a rapper, I call dips on U.I. Scooty, okay? U.I. Scooty is 1,700 times larger than our son. They say that if you put U.I. Scooty

in the place of our son at the center of our solar system, its outer edge would extend past Jupiter. Its energy output is literally millions of times greater than our sons. God created U.I. Scooty simply by saying, "Let there be light." I want you to contrast that with my power. I spent five minutes the other day trying to open a pickle jar and eventually had to hand it to Veronica. (audience laughs) If the gap between God's power and mine is that great, why would I assume the gap between God's wisdom and mine is a lot smaller? I can't properly assemble a piece of Ikea furniture and I'm questioning the God of the universe. This is where I think people like Bart Erman over at UNC make a crucial mistake. You see Dr. Erman always explains to his freshman class at UNC that he lost his faith because of the presence of his words, purposeless evil. Purposeless evil in the world, tragic things for which Dr. Erman could see no discernible purpose. Charles Darwin said the same thing, by the way, but I want you to notice the assumption behind this phrase. How does he know it's purposeless? The only way he could know suffering is purposeless is if he possessed enough knowledge

to rule out every possible purpose that an infinitely wise God might have. That is an awfully big boast for people who can't always open a pickle jar. So I will ask you again. If already, with only a little time and distance, you can already look back and see the purpose behind some of the pain in your life, don't you think that given an eternal perspective, you might see the reason for all of it. Ecclesiastes 3 says we cannot avoid the bad chapters and we really shouldn't want to because see, it's part of how God makes everything beautiful. He has made everything beautiful in its time. By the way, you and I can see that even more clearly than Solomon did because we know that a thousand years after Solomon wrote these words, God himself entered into the world and entered into the hevel of our pain. On the cross, he absorbed the ultimate source of that pain, which will sin and then he defeated it and overturned it to the resurrection. And now we see he's doing similar things in our pain that he did in Jesus' resurrection. Every cross in the moment feels pointless, but then God transforms it through resurrection, making everything beautiful in its time. Here is the first big question that Ecclesiastes 3 asks you. Are you willing to trust the God of the cross in resurrection with the seasons of your life?

I think I've told you about one of my worst parenting experiences ever. It was when my first daughter went in for a third round of vaccine shots. If I remember right, she was about a year and a half old. Veronica usually took our kids to the doctor, but she told me that this one I had to do all by myself and she did not tell me why. Five minutes into disappointment, I figured out why. When that doctor stuck her with that first needle, Keras let out a cry to spare that would have woken the dead. So the doctor said, "Hey, for the next couple of shots, "I need you to hold her still." So I took my baby girl, my arms, She felt so safe. She was in her daddy's arms and then as I held her still, that doctor gave her those second and third shots. That look of betrayal in her eyes is something that will haunt me for the rest of my life. As she screamed, she looked nowhere except right in my eyes as if to say, "How could you, daddy?" Not only are you not protecting me from that evil man, you're enabling him. Of course, I wanted to explain to her that this was for her good. She couldn't grasp that yet. From her perspective, her loving daddy had suddenly become cruel, that you and I know that there was another explanation and that is her loving father had a good reason for allowing that pain once she simply couldn't understand yet. The problem wasn't with my love, the problem was with her perspective. Every day when you encounter suffering that you cannot explain, you're confronted with those same two explanations. If your loving father has ceased to be good, or there is a wisdom beyond what you can

presently see, the teacher urges us to go with the latter, to trust a redeeming God with a beautiful plan who will make everything beautiful in its time, just like the resurrection promises that he will. Number two, he encourages us, secondly in these verses, to enjoy life as a gift. Enjoy life as a gift. Watch this. He received that there is nothing better for us than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live. Also, verse 13, that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil. This is God's gift to man. Now, this is maybe the most repeated and most surprising theme of Ecclesiastes. God really wants you, He commands you to enjoy your life. And do good, and do good, and do good, which means fulfill the purpose God has for you. God has a specific mission and a calling for you that He wants you to fulfill. Enjoy life and do good is basically the whole message of Ecclesiastes in one verse. We're going to focus on that last idea, do good in later chapters. For right now, I want to zero in on that first part, which is I perceive there's nothing better for them than to be joyful, to take pleasure in what they're eating and drinking and what they're doing, because that is God's gift to you now. You see, I grew up in a Christian subculture, and so did many of you that emphasized self-denial and sacrifice, denivy impulses of your flesh, pick up the cross, lay it all down for the mission, give it all away, and hear me, that is a crucial, indispensable part of following Jesus. Jesus said, after all, if any man would come after me, he's got a... deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me, but, but. I realize now that in our haste to emphasize this part of the discipleship message, we overlook another crucial part, namely, that God is a good father and creator who gives us richly all things to enjoy, and He delights and our enjoyment of those things. You see, we focused in my Christian subculture, we focused on only half of the truth, we focused on the part about what we were to deny, but we were largely unaware of what we were supposed

to enjoy. Here's the whole truth. God created the world first for us to enjoy, and only secondly to deny to. You see, I want you to consider this, okay? Jesus denied Himself more than any other human being ever has, right? He took on the role of a servant, He voluntarily died on a cross, and yet, and yet, look at how He lived the rest of His life. He attended parties. He made excellent wine, the best party wine people had ever tasted. He enjoyed woodworking. He noticed birds, He admired flowers, He enjoyed amazing meals with friends. Scholars point out that almost all the stories in the Gospel of Luke center around meals. In fact, one of them said Jesus basically ate His way through the Gospel of Luke. Now, y'all, that's a Savior I can follow, amen? Jesus once compared Himself to the bridegroom at a wedding, and there is nobody at a wedding happier than that guy. Hebrews 1-9, I love this verse, says that Jesus was anointed with the oil of gladness beyond His companions. You know what that means? Jesus was always the happiest dude in the room. He'd be the happiest person you would ever meet. Get your mind around this, the most self-denying person who has ever lived was also the most profoundly alive. God did not create taste buds because calories needed somewhere to land. He did so because he's generous. And the God who invented strawberries and warm chocolate chip cookies and mountain sunsets and jazz music and Labrador Retrievers and smoked brisket hallelujah is not embarrassed. And he's not surprised when we enjoy them. I mean, not to make this PG-13, but God invented sex. Right?

I mean, God didn't. Okay. That's right. I don't get too excited about it. But God did not look down from heaven and go, wait a minute, they're enjoying this? I just meant it for procreation. Now we're going to have to make some rules. No. It delights when we enjoy his gifts and he is glorified when we enjoy them. Imagine your parents spent months picking out the perfect birthday gift for your child. Your kid opens it. He looks at it. He says, Oh, thank you, daddy. And he puts it back in the box and puts it away up on the shelf because he thinks enjoying it would be selfish. As a parent, you wouldn't say, no, no, no, no. You wouldn't say, no, but now you're really honoring me, son, by putting it away. You say, son, no, go enjoy it. That's why I bought it for you in a similar way God gives us friendships and meals and laughter and vacations and children and music and hobbies as expressions of his fatherly love that he wants us to enjoy. So Solomon says, enjoy each day to the fullest, not like the hedonist for whom pleasure is the whole substance of their lives, but like the Christian for whom life is a gift. Remember from last week, the hedonist says, eat, drink and be merry for this is all we have. Ecclesiastes says, no, eat, drink and be merry because this is what we have. You understand the difference in those? Solomon says, these gifts are not all we have. God is the basis of our lives. There is an eternity with him.

This world is not all there is. But these are gifts that God gave us to enjoy today. So we enjoy each one of them to the fullest. Just never mistake one of God's gifts for God himself. Enjoy life as a gift. By the way, don't miss how this point pairs with this point. Ecclesiastes presents point one, trust God together with point two because they go together as a pair. Never enjoy life, listen, you will never enjoy life until you trust God. The anxious person cannot enjoy their life today because they're worried about tomorrow. You're trying to cling to things in the world. You're trying to stockpile them. Or you're looking around at what everybody else has and comparing yourself to those other people. And in both cases, the joys of life, rather than being joys, they become heaven. It's like my friend Bobby Jameson says, enjoy is a present tense verb and to do it, you must be present and not tense. Which is so cheesy. But so awesome. In fact, I texted him and said that is the cheesiest, equal parts cheesy and awesome at the same time. Because I trust God as my sufficiency for today and as my supply for tomorrow, I can enjoy the abundance that he puts into my life today because I appreciate them for what they are. And that is his gifts and his goodness, but not the substance and foundation of my life. I perceive that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live. I told you last week, I'm 53 years old now. And sometimes I look at Veronica, my wife, she's way younger than me, of course. I mean, when we got married, we were only like four and a half years apart, but somehow

now I'm two decades older than she is, okay? It's like we were in that movie Interstellar where I age at one rate and she ages at another. But we're both still healthy. Sometimes I look at her now and I think, I know, I know, I know under this era of youthfulness and energy, I know it's not going to last forever. See, it's really easy now for us to look forward to something in the future, some financial goal we want to hit, being able to purchase something we've always dreamed of owning, the freedom of retirement, the joy of grandkids. But I bet you, I bet you when we get there, we'll look back from there and wish we better enjoy the days of our youth and our health, wish we'd not taken for granted what it was like to be full of energy and to go wherever we wanted. And of course, one day, one day one of us will. able to go back and be able to take a hike to the woods together again or to fall asleep watching Seinfeld together one more time and so I want to enjoy every moment I have right now with all of its blessings I want to enjoy them to the fullest not because this is all I have no I have God and I have an eternity promised to me but because it is what I have right now these are the good old days every era is the good old days every day is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and until you think that you are never gonna be fulfilled please would you stop thinking that happiness and contentment is found in some future state that you might get to oh it's gonna be great if I can ever just get married when we have kids when I get to this career success when I have this amount of wealth when I'm finally done being sick when I get tenured as a professor when I go pro if you think that when you get there you're gonna find out it's hevel I promise you there is no future state that can make you happier than you have the capability of being right now contentment is about how you relate to God today not about things you might own tomorrow you get that contentment is about your posture toward God not about the amount of your possessions and it's only when you think that that you will stop rushing through the days and you'll just start enjoying them like I've heard

it said life is like a snow day you can't schedule it you can't control it sometimes the timing of a snow day feels perfect if you're a kid it always feels that way other times it is super inconvenient what you should really do when it comes is just enjoy it go out and play with your kids in the snow Solomon says you need to trust in a redeeming God with a beautiful plan number two you need to enjoy every day as a gift number three you need to embrace life above the Sun is the only satisfying answer for life under the Sun this is what we introduced last week that I told you was the theme of the book you see for the rest of this chapter chapter 3 the writer muses about how matineely disappointing it is when you cling to life under the Sun for satisfaction for example verse 16 he talks about how often this world's justice systems let us down moreover he said I saw under the Sun that in the place of justice even there was wickedness in the place of righteousness even there was wickedness there are few things in life more bewildering than to encounter wickedness in the places that justice and righteousness is supposed to rain like in a perverted court of law or in a church where you experience abusive leadership or in a home where your parents are abusive law courts and homes and churches were supposed to be places of respite and refuge where you could experience a little bit of heaven and when somebody gets denied justice in court or they get mistreated in one of those other places where they get cord is example when you get when you don't get justice in court because somebody else manipulated the process with their money whether it's parents being the not justice for their child's killer or groups whose rights and dignity get trampled on we look at that in bewilderment and despair and we say well things never be right teacher says in that moment you got to look the life above the Sun for an answer so I said in my heart God will judge the righteous and the wicked but there is a time for every matter for every work Pastor Ray Orton recounts here in an interview with a woman involved in rescuing girls from the sex trade and the interviewer asked this lady how she could endure hearing such horrific stories day after day after day and her

answer was there is one reason I can do that and that is because I believe in a God of judgment and I believe there is a God who will have the final world for every single one of these girls let me just tell you this and I say this not from a place of cynicism from a place of reality if you are counting on justice under the Sun you are going to be disappointed and you are gonna end up better the simple fact of the matter is listen you're gonna see this the older you get the good guy does not always win the honorable business partner sometimes gets cheated the faithful parent gets blamed human justice systems This a point and if all you have with despair, despair that can literally poison your soul but if you believe what Solomon clung to, that God has the last word, it will give you a sense of peace. But I mean, you ever stop fighting for justice here? This gives you a way not to end up in madness or despair. There's one other way Solomon points to life above the sun as the only answer to life under the sun and it's back in verse 11. Solomon says he has put eternity in the man's heart. There is something eternal inside of you that only something infinite can fill. I want you to think about it. I've already done one cheesy thing. Let me do another one here. Put your hand on your heart for a minute. Feel, feel this right here. There is a gap right there that only eternity can fill. Let me illustrate it this way. Every time you shower, you use about 15 to 20 gallons of water, they say. For me, it's probably 15 gallons for each of my daughters. I'm guessing it's closer to 50, okay? That may sound like a lot but it's actually just a small percentage of the water that we use daily. The average American family of four, they say, uses about 400 gallons of water every day. 400 gallons every day. If I had a onstage, a bucket that was large enough to contain the 400 gallons that your family of four uses every day, that gallon, that bucket would need to be about the size of a pickup truck bed. I tried to actually back one in here for this but the production team all threatened to quit. So you're just going to have to use your imagination, okay? A pickup truck bed size bucket is all the water that you use in a day. Now, I want you to try to imagine a bucket that could hold the water from a mid-sized lake. Kind of lake that nobody outside of our area would have ever heard of, like Hiko Lake, just north of here. Like Hiko contains, I think it's, my numbers are like 25, what is that, billion gallons of water, 25 billion gallons of water. To hold all the water and like Hiko in a bucket, your bucket would need to go from being the size

of a pickup truck bed, it would need to go to the size of Manhattan with side six feet tall. If you wanted a bucket that contained all the water on Earth, total amount of water on Earth is 366 quintillion, 200 twirillion, no quadrillion gallons of water. If you wanted a bucket big enough to hold all that water, you would need to construct a wall around the continental United States that reached 103 miles high, or a bucket the size of the U.S. that extended halfway to the space station. Now I want you to imagine a bucket so big that all the water in the world wouldn't even cover the surface area of the bottom. That bucket, Solomon says, is your soul. And some of you wonder why after obtaining so many things that you have wanted, why you are still unhappy, it is because you have an eternity-sized bucket in that heart of yours and you keep trying to fill it up with little dixie cups of water. Our hearts are restless, St. Augustine said, they're restless until they find the rest and you, we crave permanence, we crave justice, we crave beauty that does not fade. Friends who will never leave, love that never ends, we crave significance that death cannot erase. Y'all, these are not bugs in the system. These are not illusions created by Darwinistic evolution that help us survive. They are evidence that you were built for eternity, not for earth. Some of you are trying to fill that void of yours with little dixie cup-sized amounts of water. That promotion at work, yeah, it was awesome, but it was just a dixie cup. That vacation, another dixie cup, every championship, every romance, every new boyfriend, every new house, every new grandchild, every standing ovation, wonderful gifts, real gifts, good gifts from a good God, but still just dixie cups. You were made to hold an ocean. When are you going to understand this? You were not created for things down here. Jonathan Edwards said, the enjoyment of God is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. All the joys of the world, strawberries and jazz music and husbands and As expression of the one who made them, they are good gifts. As substitutes for Him, they're heavy. Jesus is the one that your soul is missing. Your heart is always going to feel restless until you find your rest in Him. That's why Christianity hear me. That's why Christianity is not first and foremost about giving you advice for how to live better under the sun. Christianity is about introducing you to the only one big enough to satisfy that eternal void that God put inside you. I don't preach a religion. I don't preach a Christian code. I preach Jesus.

Which brings me to the good news of Ecclesiastes. A thousand years after Solomon wrote this book, one of Solomon's great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson's, the Son of God Himself, entered into Solomon's heaven. And mine and yours. You realize that Jesus experienced every season of Ecclesiastes 3. He was born. He laughed. He wept. He built up. He was torn down. He loved. He lost. He was betrayed. He died. And then in the greatest miscarriage of justice the world has ever known. The only truly righteous man was condemned in an unjust court. Jesus experienced wickedness in the courts of justice in ways that very few of us ever will, but He did it joyfully because His heart was filled with infinite love for us, the kind of love that can satisfy that eternal whole in our hearts. See that brings me back to where we started. Some of you have all the parts of your life spread out in the floor and you can't figure out why you can't make it all work. You got career and you got marriage and you got kids and you got money, vacations and friendships. Every piece is spread out on the floor and you're still wondering why life won't come together. It's because you've left out the one piece that brings all of them together and that's Jesus. It was a story I used to tell when I was a youth pastor. I heard it as a true story. I guess I can't verify whether it's true, but it went like this. Dr. Leo Winters was the most notable ER doctor in Chicago. Dr. Winters got a call at his home late one evening about a young boy who had been severely injured in an accident. After asking a few questions, Dr. Winters knew he had to go to the ER immediately because his hands might be the only hands that were capable of saving this little boy's life. So he jumped out of bed, he got dressed, got into his car and headed for the hospital. Time was critical. So Dr. Winters decided to take a shortcut through one of the rougher parts of Chicago. At a red light, his car door was suddenly yanked open. And a man in a gray hat, an old flannel shirt, grabbed Dr. Winters and started to pull him out of the car.

Dr. Winters tried to explain, "I'm a doctor. I'm a doctor. There's a boy dying at a hospital. I have to get there." But the man wouldn't listen to shove them out of the car, hopped in and sped away. By the time Dr. Winters finally found another way to the hospital, it was too late. The boy had died about 30 minutes before Dr. Winters got there. When Dr. Winters walked in, the nurse pulled in the boy's father, was just devastated. He's terribly upset. He just doesn't understand why you never showed up. Dr. Winters said, "Well, where is he at? I at least want to go and explain. Explain why I couldn't get here." She said, "Well, he's down in the chapel." So Dr. Winters walks down the hallway, enters into this dimly lit chapel, and he goes in. There's only one man inside. His head is in his hands. He's weeping. When the man looks up, Dr. Winters recognizes him immediately. He was wearing the same gray hat, the same old flannel shirt, as the guy who pulled him out of his car. That father had carjacked the one man who could have saved his son. You see, some of us are doing something tragically similar with God. You're doing the same thing with Jesus. You keep pushing away. The very one you're looking for. The only one who's actually big enough to satisfy the eternity he has put inside your heart. You don't want to give up control because that scares you, but I'm just telling you, it's not the new marriage. chain, not moving to Florida, it's not retiring in Hawaii, it's just Jesus you're looking for. It's always been him. Jesus is the answer to the hevel of Ecclesiastes. I want you to bow your heads at all of our campuses if you would. I want to want to extend two invitations to you. First is I want to offer a number of you a chance for you to surrender to Jesus. You see, I believe right now I am talking to several people that you've yet to surrender your life to Jesus completely and totally in trust. If that's you, if you feel like I've never fully surrendered my life to Jesus, could you just raise your hand? I'm the only one looking around. I'm not doing this to embarrass you, but you're like, I haven't done it and I would like to do it this morning. But a lot of you, whether I can see you or not, you can put them down. Salvation is when you surrender your life fully to Jesus and you receive him

as your Savior. You see, the gospel is that you couldn't save yourself by being good enough, so Jesus did it in your place and he offers that as a free gift. So, if you have never received Jesus and surrendered to him, I want you to say right now, say this from your heart. It's got to come from your heart, but you can use these words. Jesus, I know only you can save me. I receive the gift of salvation and I surrender my life to you. Here's my second invitation. There's some of you who have already received, surrendered your life to Jesus, but you're the place in your life where you just need to come to Jesus to tell him that you trust him, that you trust him, that you don't understand, but you trust him. I'm going to invite you to come down at your campus to kneel in prayer around our altars at the front and just make a declaration that you're going to trust in a redeeming God with a beautiful plan, even though you don't understand it, you understand wisdom. If not knowing how life makes sense, it's trusting that God makes sense even when life doesn't. And I want you to declare that. You say, well, let me cannot do that here in my seat. Of course, you can. Of course, you can. But some of you need to make that declaration. You need to say, God, I'm just going to receive life as a gift. I'm going to enjoy every day and I'm going to trust that you, the God of the cross and the resurrection, as a beautiful plan. Here's what I want us to do. I want to set all of our campuses to stand to our feet right now. Everybody at all campuses, stand to your feet. I'm going to pray over us. And then I'm going to invite you to respond to the Holy Spirit. Father, I pray in Jesus' name, come Holy Spirit. You're the real preacher, not me. So apply this in ways that I cannot and draw people to the rest and the joy that is in you. I pray that in Jesus' name. In Jesus' name, I'm going to ask right now at all of our campuses for our prayer teams to come up. They're going to move right now. I'm going to invite you just to go ahead and come. You don't need to wait on the worship team. You just come right now. If you want to pray with one of them, you just go right to them. If you just want to kneel around the altar, grab somebody, come. You kneel. You do that right now. If you prayed with me a moment ago to surrender your life to Jesus, I'm going to ask you that you make your way to one of these people on the right or left and just say, "I prayed to receive Jesus." But right now at all of our campuses as our worship team comes, would you respond to the Holy Spirit and give Him the trust? Maybe that means coming forward to do that. Bring us somebody.

You come right now as our worship teams come.