Everything Is Meaningless - Listening to Wisdom’s Whisper

We're in the final stretch of a sermon series entitled Everything is Meaningless, I just like the return I think about.

That was the sermon series title that we chose, but it really does depict very well what is communicated in this book.

The book of Ecclesiastes is one of the wisdom books in the Bible, in the Old Testament, and it's different than, like the book of Proverbs, which says if you do this, then this will happen.

If you don't do this, then this won't happen, or this will happen, right.

So, cause and effect, the book of Ecclesiastes kind of goes outside of the rules and talks a lot about the exceptions to the rules, and so it's very different, vastly different.

That's why, when you read the Word of God please listen to me you need to read the Word of God in its entirety in order to get fully what God wants us to get.

If you're only reading one book of the Bible over and over and over again, you're not going to get the full picture of what God wants us to get and, most of all, you're not going to get the full picture of the character and nature of God that is found throughout all of Scripture.

Ok, so we live in a fallen world, if you haven't noticed that.

It's confusing, it's frustrating at times, and this book dives deep into those types of feelings and reality.

So let's look at chapter 9, verses 13 through 18.

Here is another bit of wisdom that has impressed me as I have watched the way our world works.

There was a small town with only a few people, and a great king came with his army and besieged it.

A poor wise man knew how to save the town, and so it was rescued, but afterward no one thought to thank him.

So, even though wisdom is better than strength, those who are wise will be despised if they are poor.

What they say will not be appreciated for long.

Better to hear the quiet words of a wise person than the shouts of a foolish king.

Better to have wisdom than weapons of war.

But one sinner can destroy much that is good.

Let's pray together, father.

We thank you for these words of wisdom that come to us from the book of Ecclesiastes, and, father, we ask that you would open our minds and our hearts to your truth.

Today.

We ask that you would prepare the soil of our hearts, lord.

Where there are stones that need to be removed, where there are thorns and thistles, would you pull them out and would you work the ground so that, when this seed is placed in the ground, that it would grow and be watered by your spirit and produce the fruit that you desire for it to produce in each of our lives?

We thank you for doing this in Jesus' name, amen.

I'm sure that many of us have heard of the band for king and country.

How many of you know that band for king and country?

All right.

So for king and country, and for those of you who may not know who that is, if you're a Dolly Parton fan, you will have heard recently a song called God Only Knows, and she's singing that song with this group for king and country, right.

And for some of us that are of a different age category over 50 I'll say I'm 51 today, so if you're over 50, I'm in your camp, right.

So there was a young lady from our childhood named Rebecca St James, and she's another one that maybe that name will remind you of something from the past.

But there's a movie that's been made.

It's gonna be showing in this next April and it's called Unsung Hero and it's the story of this family for king and country a couple of young men and then Rebecca, st James, a young lady, and all of them are from the same family and their family, their dad, is named David.

He was a successful, he had a successful music company in Australia and all of a sudden things turned and he began.

They basically went bankrupt and so they decided that they would move to America and start over with absolutely nothing right.

They came to this country with hardly anything, any kind of finance, any kind of hope for the future.

But they worked hard and the most important thing and the reason for this movie is to promote really not the bands or the music or the Academy, you know the awards, the Grammy Awards or any of those things.

The whole reason for this movie is to thank their mom, helen, because Helen was a lady in the background throughout the whole story.

They leave Australia with six children, her husband and herself, and she's pregnant, and they come to this country with nothing and through it all, the voice of their mother, quiet but strong, was we will trust in the Lord, our God, and through it all, god was faithful, as he always is, and the end of their stories obviously is beautiful in the sense that they have made music history in so many ways in the success that God has granted them, and the family has been blessed through that as well.

So kind of an amazing story.

It's interesting to me that we rarely pay attention to the people who are behind the scenes, the quiet ones in the backdrop, the ones who don't have a microphone in their hands or aren't on the stage right Of life I'm just talking about in life and yet it's so important for us to truly understand that there are people praying right now for each and everyone.

I believe this that God has people praying for all of us.

When I was so sick back in 2020, one of the things that was the most amazing to me was hearing from people around the world who were praying for me.

That didn't even know me, but God had put it on their hearts to pray for me.

All of us, I believe.

And if not, even if you can't point to a person here in this earth, guess what we know for sure the Lord, jesus Christ, is seated at the right hand of his father and he lives to make intercession for us.

Jesus himself is praying for us today.

What's gonna conquer that?

What's gonna be greater than that right?

So I think it is important and this story that we read here from Ecclesiastes really points to that, that there was this poor, unknown wise man who just rescues a town.

It doesn't even give the strategy.

It doesn't say how this happened or what he did.

It just says there's a poor wise man who came to a town and rescued it because it was being taken over by a great king and his army.

The sad truth was, afterward no one even thought of him.

No one even paid attention to this poor wise man who had come to rescue them.

His status as a poor man in their minds outweighed the wisdom that he used to save them from their enemy.

We're going to return to this thought at the end of the message, but first let's review the content of the beginning of chapter 9.

And maybe some of it will sound familiar, because it's an ongoing thought that is found throughout the whole book of Ecclesiastes.

So let's start in verse 1 of chapter 9.

And the passage of this little section is entitled we're All Gonna Die.

There's no amends.

There's no, it's true, though Unless Jesus returns in our lifetime, we will all face death.

Ecclesiastes 9, verse 1 through 6.

Ecclesiastes 9:1–6

This too, I carefully explored.

Even though the actions of godly and wise people are in God's hands.

No one knows whether God will show them favor.

The same destiny ultimately awaits everyone, whether righteous or wicked, good or bad, ceremonially clean or unclean, religious or irreligious.

Good people receive the same treatment as sinners, and people who make promises to God are treated like people who don't.

It seems so wrong that everyone under the sun suffers the same fate.

Already twisted by evil, people choose their own mad course, for they have no hope.

There's nothing ahead but death anyway.

Are you encouraged this morning?

There is hope only for the living.

As they say, it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion That'll preach.

The living at least know that they will die.

But the dead know nothing.

They have no further reward, nor are they remembered.

Whatever they did in their lifetime loving, hating, envying is all long gone.

They no longer play a part in anything here on earth.

So we'd be dismissed.

We literally all will, won't we?

At one point in time this is a consistent theme throughout the book Solomon spends a lot of time or at least his use of the teacher spends a lot of time kind of going into the deepest, darkest thoughts and imaginations on death as he nears the end of his own life here on this earth.

He's evaluating his life based on the fact that he realizes that he's getting close to the end of his life here on earth, and so, as he does that and understand, the word of God is inspired by Holy Spirit right?

So this book was placed here for a reason not just to depress us or to make us feel bad about the end of things here on this life, but it is put here for reasons that are very important.

We're going to talk about some of that this morning.

Now, have you noticed that throughout the book of Ecclesiastes, that Solomon has not really mentioned the afterlife?

He hasn't talked about the fact that, once we die here on this earth, that there is something that will happen afterward, that we will face God himself in the person of Jesus, and that Jesus will separate us out based on what we did with him and whether we believed on him, why we were here in this life.

Those of us who, graciously, by God's grace, have been given the gift of repentance and have put our hope and confidence and faith in Jesus Christ will hear him say well done, my good and faithful servant.

Enter into my father's rest.

Those are the words we all long to hear right Now how many of us know that we cannot get there on our own achievement.

We can't be righteous enough or holy enough to receive the benefit of those words from a holy God.

So how in the world is a holy God, who never lies, going to be able to speak those words over us?

It's because his beloved son Jesus came and took our sin and our shame and our guilt and our failings and our inabilities upon himself and was nailed to a cross and he said Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

And his final words on that tree it is finished.

So when we stand before a holy God, it will not be our own goodness that grants us entrance.

It will be the fact that we have been adopted into the family of God by the grace of God that's found in Jesus Christ alone.

On the other side of things, we realize also, unfortunately, there will be some who will hear the words depart from me, for I never knew you.

They will be separated.

There will be those millions of people who will be separated from God forever.

A lot of people talk about hell as a destination in the sense of all of the things that people will encounter there.

It's really what people won't encounter that matters the most.

Can you imagine life for a moment in time without the presence of God?

What would happen to this world if God removed his hand for one moment?

The good news is in a couple of weeks Solomon is going to address the afterlife and we're going to see that where he leaves us hanging in all of these chapters beforehand is not the end of the story.

There's more to it, but I don't want to jump the gun on that.

But we do need to look at this seriously.

It's something to consider, kind of like the Old Testament word silla, which means to sit and ponder, meditate on and think about something.

Consider it.

Solomon believed in the afterlife, but he was wanting us to focus primarily on the finality of death, when it comes to our inability to control when or how it will happen and how that should affect the way that we live.

Remember we talked a couple of weeks ago about our desire to control everything and to take that out of God's hands.

This is an area where we cannot control the outcome.

It will come to those that the earth would consider the best of us and those that the earth would consider the worst.

So, in knowing that we're all going to die one day, we should choose to enjoy the gift of life with those we love.

Now we can say amen to that right.

We should choose that.

That's a choice that we must make every day, every day.

In verse 7 through 10, he says so go ahead, eat your food with joy and drink your wine with a happy heart, for God approves of this.

God approves of the disclaimers, right.

God does not approve of drunkenness, right.

Or he doesn't approve of gluttony, right.

So he doesn't approve of overeating and he doesn't approve of starving yourself.

Moderation, all things in moderation, right.

So don't go crazy with that.

God approves of this.

God approves of the declaimers right.

God approves of the declaimers, right.

So, instead of being in close with a splash of cologne, how many of you, during the pandemic, when we were all locked up in our homes, got to a point in time where you actually realize that you stank Not that somebody else in your family stank, but you actually spelled your own.

What is that called?

You went off the couch and you went and took a shower and brushed your hair and shaved, maybe put some actual clothes on instead of jogging pants and whatever.

I just wonder how many Zoom calls were.

I'm not going to go there.

You know what I was thinking, but I'm not going to say it out loud.

There's so much we can get to the point to where we realize how many of you have ever seen the show alone?

Do you know what that is?

So there's a show alone where people are sent out into the wilderness by themselves and they have cameras that they have to film themselves and they're out there for like a hundred days with no power.

No, I mean they have water in the sense that there's a place to fish and all of that.

But it's always funny when their loved ones come to meet up with them and of course, they're hugging and kissing and a couple of times where that has happened after a hundred days, somebody is really honest and they say, whew, you stink.

So I'm not trying to make a point about stinking.

What I am saying is that you know, we all know we're going to die, but we don't have to live like that every day.

Sometimes depression tries to keep us in states where we just don't get up, clean up, put on some decent clothes and go out amongst other people and live a little right.

So I wanna encourage you.

If you find yourself in that state, there are people here who will love you and pray for you, and I also just encourage you to ask the Lord for the desire to get back up again, to begin to live again, to breathe again.

It's important to do that and then he goes, live happily with the woman you love, through all the meaningless days of life that God has given you under the sun, and I say amen, amen, amen.

I'm so grateful for my wife, amy, been married 30 years this last April, and somebody was asking me this last week what is the secret to the success of your marriage?

And without even thinking about it, I said we started out as best friends.

We started out as best friends.

And then the other thing, obviously very quickly, is God brought us together, let's not forget that but we started out as best friends.

And the thing about marriage is we have the privilege of both.

We have the privilege of being friends, and if you're not friends, you can choose.

You can choose.

You can't control the other person, but you can choose to be friendly, right as far as your concerns.

You can choose to be friendly to your spouse.

And then the other thing is that you also can cultivate the types of things that lead to a healthy marriage, and we'll talk about that in just a minute.

The wife God gives you as your reward for all your earthly toil, whatever you do, do well, for when you go to the grave, there will be no work or planning, or knowledge or wisdom.

How many of you know that some of the best things in life happen around meals, happen around food?

Right, can you think of some?

How about what?

Is it?

Conversations?

Yeah, it's conversations.

How about laughter?

Sometimes the greatest laughs that we have are around the supper table, the dinner table, right?

How about stories that come out of times like that, stories that you hear that even our kids at times will tell stories from our childhood and they're like well, I didn't know about that, like well, I didn't think to say it until we were eating the chicken sausage, just brought back a memory, you know, whatever it is.

How about birthdays?

I don't know why I put that in there.

I didn't put.

Did you write that?

No, just kidding.

Holidays, weddings, anniversaries, fellowship time, cookouts, marriage and how about the marriage supper of the lamb?

My friends, our reunion with Jesus is not going to be a weary event, our reunion with Jesus, is going to be a celebration of all that he has done, so let's not forget to have meals together, one of the things that I see.

Amy and I go out often and it's sad to see a family that sits together and none of them speak to each other the whole meal.

They're all on their phones.

Maybe they're texting each other from across the table.

I don't know, that could be, they're very private people and they're just texting.

But, man, especially after being married 40, 50 years now, I know that at times at that stage of life, you know each other's thinking pretty well.

So you don't have to have maybe the same level of conversation, but take advantage of the time that you have together.

Celebrate marriage and family.

Celebrate it.

This is not something to regret or to have angst about.

Celebrate it.

Choose joy.

Go out on dates.

Hello, go out on dates.

Take your spouse out.

Listen.

You might say, well, we don't have any money, it's too expensive.

Make some PB and J at home and go to the park and swing.

I can't swing.

You know what I'm saying.

Be creative.

Weren't you creative when you were young?

Be creative.

Celebrate marriage and family with hugs and kisses.

Don't let the affection go out of your, dwindle, out of your marriage.

Share tears of joy and tears of pain.

Here's something that's a heavy revelation.

It takes two to fight.

Be the one that chooses not to fight in love.

Don't do it and go.

Nanny, nanny, nanny, who's the holy one now?

Yeah, that's fighting.

You're fighting by saying that right there.

Okay, you're picking a fight.

Treat each other as God's gift.

Live your life on this earth with joy.

Enjoy every moment as a gift from God, because we literally don't know if you haven't heard it yet, we don't know when we're gonna breathe our last breath Now.

I realize that this doesn't apply to everybody in the room or those that are watching online, because there are many people that unfortunately have lost loved ones, spouses, maybe even recently, or you find yourself in a situation where you're not living close to other family members, so you feel isolated at times.

I want you to know that there's hope for you as well.

Our Heavenly Father and his spiritual family just look around you right now, if you're here in the room will fill in the gap for those without earthly marriage and family.

Note the Bible says about our Heavenly Father.

It says that he's a father to the fatherless, that he's a defender of widows, that he places the lonely in families, that he has placed us into the household of God, each member providing what the other one needs.

We are the bride of Christ.

So be encouraged.

Even if you don't have what Amy and I have and I'm so grateful for that but even if you're not experiencing that in your own life, I'm here to tell you there's no love that is greater than the father's love for us.

And if Amy and I don't experience that for ourselves as individuals, we'll never be able to have the kind of marriage that we want to have.

Right, every Christian of every age, whether married or single, needs to belong to a larger family of faith.

One of the reasons that I believe that there is such a push, even amongst Christians, to walk away from church and to walk away from church life is because of the fact that Satan knows that we are stronger together than we are apart.

Right, so be a part of a family of faith, and we sure hope that this is the one that God chooses for you.

But if it's another one, get plugged in, be a part of that family and then finally do our work well as unto the Lord, and that work isn't always like a nine to five.

Sometimes it's changing diapers, sometimes it's driving carpool, sometimes it is actually working your job as unto the Lord.

Can you imagine what a difference Christians could make in a world where nobody cares, seems to care, about anybody else?

How many of you have tried lately to find something in any store where you needed somebody's help, and what was your experience?

I don't know.

You know, or I'll get somebody else, or let me look it up.

I'm like I can look it up, but I've looked it up, I can't find it.

Can you please help me find it?

Can you imagine Christians out in the workplace who were serving God and serving others?

What a difference that could make, just even in the attitude.

That's the way that we should be.

We should make a difference in every aspect of culture.

This is in such opposition to the world's way of thinking.

The world's form of happiness is fast food and a full schedule.

It's the addictive pursuit of everything new.

When is the next iPhone coming out and can I get my name on the list?

It is live together instead of getting married.

Sorry, it's true, it is breakup.

Whenever you want it is.

Take shortcuts to guarantee to avoid hard work but still get rich very quick.

That's the dream that we've been given.

How many of you know it is lacking in so many ways?

Life's outcomes aren't easily determined, but death will come to all.

There's another whole section that you can focus in on, verses 11 through 12.

I'm not gonna read them for the sake of time, but it just says again death will come.

So let's get now to the rest of the story.

Let's go back to what we started with in the beginning, and I wanna just take a few minutes on this.

So there was a small town with only a few people.

I'm gonna give you what I believe could be an interpretation for this story that the teacher tells us about this poor man who had such wisdom.

So what is this small town?

What does it represent?

I think it could represent any place that's vulnerable to attack, any place that is vulnerable, any place that is vulnerable.

How about the Garden of Eden?

Did it become vulnerable?

Yeah, it became a vulnerable.

And what happened?

Satan attacked.

How about the human soul?

Can our soul be vulnerable?

Can our soul come under attack?

Yeah, we could go on and on.

You could really put any.

You could fill in the blank with almost anything in that scenario.

How about Bethlehem?

Was that a small town, a place kind of out of the way and hidden?

You might see where I'm going with this.

A great king came with his army and besieged it.

Who is this great king?

Satan is always bent on invasion and destruction.

That's what he does.

He's not your friend.

He's not somebody to be trusted.

He's not somebody that's going to show you the way.

He is literally evil incarnate.

He is evil.

Second Corinthians 4, verse 4, says Satan, who is the God of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don't believe.

2 Corinthians 4:4

They are unable to see the glorious light of the good news.

They don't even understand this message about the glory of Christ, who is the exact likeness of God.

All of us at one time in our lives were like that.

We were blinded by the king of this world, whose name is Satan.

Ephesians 2, verse 2, says you used to live in sin, just like the rest of the world, obeying the devil, the commander of the powers and the unseen world.

Ephesians 2:2

He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to obey God.

It's not just a person's will or a person's level of depravity.

That's within themselves.

There is something greater that is at work.

There is a king who is attempting to attack and destroy any point of vulnerability.

That's what he does and he loves it.

He loves it when Christians, or people who are about to become Christians, suffer and struggle and hurt.

We all know the most famous verses of all in this category John 10-10.

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.

He's loud and he's abusive, but he's also in some ways beautiful and magnificent, in the sense that he can become to people what they want.

He can appear even as an angel of light to lure and to draw people into his trap.

My friends, we cannot discount the enemy that we face.

He is wicked, he is evil and he knows how to do this.

He's been doing this for millennia.

But thankfully, the story doesn't end there.

It goes on to say that a poor wise man knew how to save the town, and so it was rescued.

Who is this poor wise man?

Who is this poor wise man?

His name is Jesus.

Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world, is wisdom personified and our only deliverer.

But he didn't come to this earth with a voice of shout or the cry of archangels.

There will be a day and a time when he will do that.

And we're all looking for that day, aren't we?

We're wishing and hoping and wanting and praying for that day.

But when he came to this earth, initially in the incarnation born of a virgin, born in Bethlehem, in a stable laid in a manger, a poor God who made himself poor so that we could become rich.

Second Corinthians 8.9 says that you know the generous grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, though he was rich, yet for your sakes, he became poor so that by his poverty he could make you rich and put out of your mind dollar signs.

What is the richest thing of all?

To have a right relationship with our eternal God and Father.

That's eternal, that's forever.

John 10, 10b says I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

That's what Jesus does, that's his job, that's his calling.

First Corinthians 1.24,.

But to those called by God to salvation, both Jews and Gentiles, christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God, colossians 2.3,.

In him lie hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

This poor boy born in Bethlehem has become the King of kings and Lord of lords, and his name will rule and reign forever and ever.

This is the truth that we believe, but the story doesn't end with the poor man rescuing the vulnerable.

It says next, but afterward, no one thought to thank him.

Often, my friends, when the crisis passes, when the destruction is over, when devastation is done, wisdom has had its way and Christ has come in as the Savior and the Redeemer, we forget to be thankful to the only one deserving of our praise.

Somehow we work ourselves into the story.

Somehow we created some form of energy or effort that assisted God in the process of recovery.

Somehow it was circumstance or chance or situation.

It was just blind luck that caused us to come out of that hole in the pit that we were in.

My friends, we are, as a whole, an unthankful people.

How many of us thank those who cook our food each meal?

How many of us are thankful every time that we have the chance to put gasoline in our car?

It grieved the preacher that the wisdom is better than power.

He's saying that the wisdom of this poor man was greater than the power of this satanic king, and yet the poor man was subsequently despised.

Look down upon.

This is nothing new for Jesus.

This is not a new invention.

This is not a 2023 reality.

Isaiah 53 says it very clearly he was despised and rejected by men.

A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised and we esteemed him not.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God and afflicted, but he was pierced for our transgressions.

He was crushed for our iniquities.

On him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed.

Doesn't stop there, friends.

All we, like sheep, have gone astray.

We have turned everyone to his own way and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

Though this master and savior has delivered us with a great deliverance, how little he is honored and appreciated.

Most people of this world live as if he never lived, never died, never was buried and never rose again.

They pretend by writing him out of history, by making him a story along with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

And before we get too harsh or hard on the world around us, let's consider our own hearts, our own minds, our own lives, our own thought process.

Often we, as Christians, are careless about remembering him and being thankful to him until the next problem arises.

As long as things are going good, no reason to be thankful.

As long as things seem fine, no reason to be grateful.

Why should I enter into praise and worship?

Why should I lift up my voice and shout?

Why should I?

Because the rich man became a poor man to rescue us from Satan and ourselves.

It goes on to say so, even though wisdom is better than strength.

Those who are wise will be despised if they are poor.

What they say will not be appreciated for long.

Better to hear the quiet words.

Listen to this.

Better to hear the quiet words, the whispering wisdom of a wise person, than the shouts of a foolish king.

Better to have wisdom than weapons of war.

But one sinner can destroy much that is good.

And who is that one sinner?

We can all get them in our minds.

I, right now, we can think about the person that bothers us the most, the type of person, the category of person, whatever it is.

But, friends, you and I are the guilty ones as well.

We all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

How dare we become arrogant because we've been going to church for 40 years?

That is not in the notes, but I believe it's true.

When is the last time you heard the whisper of wisdom from the Savior, instead of tuning in to the shouts of a satanic being whose end is not very far away?

And you know who knows it the most.

He does, he does.

He's an expert in the Scripture.

So you will use the Scripture to divide us.

That's why we need the whole counsel of the Word of God.

We need to read the entire Bible.

We need to understand the context of God's character and nature, so that he cannot use the very gift of the Word of God to bring division among us.

Satan will scream at you and tell you all the things that you're used to hearing You're a failure.

Nobody hates you, nobody loves you.

You need to just quit.

You need to give up your jerk.

On and on and on, and all of the time, in the gentleness of a quiet moment.

The very words that we need to hear, the words of life and words of hope, are waiting for us if we will just choose to tune down the shouts and tune up the whisper.

Elijah was a man who had to learn this.

He had just come from this great mountaintop experience where God showed up in fire and consumed the sacrifice and lapped up all the water that was placed on the sacrifice, and all of the prophets of Baal were killed, and all of a sudden, he's on his way back down the mountain and he hears the word Jezebel's going to kill him.

How can you believe that After you just saw God did what he did?

How can we?

Can we be real?

You know what, when we read the book of Ecclesiastes, I was feeling like this week, as I was trying to find a message in this chapter.

To be honest with you, I was feeling like how many times can we say we're all going to die, and how many different ways can we say that?

Here's the reality, though, guys.

This is a picture of our thought life.

The book of Ecclesiastes is so good because it's us on the page.

We'd never say these things out loud, necessarily, but what is it that we meditate on?

What is the thought that plays over and over and over again in our head, and why do we believe it more than we believe the gentle whisper of the only one who is wise enough to deliver us Part of that, part of that, is a choice that we make, choosing to be thankful and grateful and to listen in the stillness and the quiet.

Those are things that we have the ability in some ways to control.

So Elijah's in this cave, hiding, and God shows up, says what are you doing?

Elijah says well, I'm sure you know this, but Jezebel's going to kill me and I'm the only one left of your prophets.

And God says oh son, I've got so many other ones.

I appreciate you for who you are.

I know you're just come off this high, but there's thousands of others that haven't bowed their knee, and God is so gracious.

He gives them a meal, tells them to take a nap and then, coming out of that, he does this show and tell for him.

He lets him if, through his vision and all of his senses, he experiences this mighty windstorm that hits the mountain.

It was such a terrible blast that the rocks were torn loose, but the Lord was not in the wind.

After the wind, there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.

And after the earthquake, there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.

And after the fire, there was the sound of a gentle whisper, gentle whisper.

I don't know how the Lord would ask you to respond today, but I know for me.

I want to repent.

I want to ask His forgiveness for the times where I have neglected to be grateful and thankful.

And then I've gotten into my head and thought about how bad things were and how difficult life was and trust me.

Trust me, I understand that every one of us is going through very difficult seasons and situations.

I'm not trying to discount what that feels like or the experience of that, but I am telling you that we have the benefit the world doesn't have.

The world cannot look anywhere but down or in the mirror.

We can look up the greatest gift that we've been given.

We put in the drawer and close the drawer and lock it until the next time where we can't go on without it.

So I'm going to just ask if you want to stand, you can.

If you want to stay where you're at and pray.

I want us to pray together and ask for grace, to begin to listen to the whisper of our wise Savior and not to give in to the shouts of any other false voice.

If we can have somebody just on the piano, it would be great.

Those of you joining us online we're thankful that you've been here with us during the service and just ask that in your own way.

However, it works for you in this moment that you would just spend some time with God and just acknowledging to him your need for him.

This is not a message to bring condemnation.

This is a message for us to be convicted by the Holy Spirit that there's a better way to live.

We don't have to live our lives locked in our heads about the fact that we're gonna die someday or about the fact that everything around us seems to be imploding.

We have the chance, because of what Jesus did, to lift up our heads, lift up our eyes and thank the God, who is more than enough.

And here's the thing he's more than enough to deliver us, and that's wonderful.

When he delivers us, he's also more than enough to carry us through something that is very, very difficult to go through.

Both graces are amazing.

So, lord, we do pray.

This morning.

We bring our lives to you.

Father, we confess I confess that I have spent far too much time dwelling on the cries and shouts of Satan and the world around me.

Lord, we are more moved at times by the news than we are by your Word and your way and your wisdom.

So, father, I pray in Jesus' name that you would help us to refocus, to turn our eyes on Jesus, to listen for the whispering wisdom of a God who sent His Son to not only just die and be raised again, but he lived the life.

He lived this life tempted in every way, just as we are yet without sin.

If anybody knows how to do this life, it's Jesus of Nazareth.

So, lord, we pray.

I pray for those now, in the sound of my voice, who are listening to this or are watching this, that have never experienced the life that comes through faith in Jesus Christ.

I pray that today would be the day that they would recognize their own inability to save themselves.

They would recognize that they've been lied to by a shouting Satan that is attempting to destroy their lives, and that they would hear the whisper of a God who says I love you.

I love you so much that I gave my only Son that if you would believe in me, you would not perish but have everlasting life.

Father, would you grant the gift of repentance and salvation to those who are not yet saved?

And if that's you, I encourage you just call out on the name of the Lord today.

Just talk to Him, explain to Him your need for Him, and then talk to somebody else that's a believer somebody in this room or somebody that you trust and tell them of your decision so that they can walk with you and pray for you.

Lord, for the rest of us, who have been in you maybe for a very long time most of our lives even Lord, we still confess that there are times, there are moments, there are days when we focus in on the wrong things.

So we ask that you would lift our eyes up, that you would lift up our countenance, that you would lift up our heads, that you would give us the grace to see beyond what's in front of us, that, just as David standing in front of Goliath could have the boldness to say to the giant that is screaming at us that you will not come against the name of the Lord, our God Father, I pray that the giants in people's lives would fall even now.

In the name of Jesus, pray for those who are hurting because they're not currently experiencing family love the way that you've designed it to be.

I pray, lord, that you would bring reconciliation where there is broken relationship.

I pray that you would heal the hearts of those who are wounded and I pray, lord, that you would help us to be a body who opens its arms wide for those who are struggling with all of the questions of life.

Help us to not be so far along in our walk with you that we forget what it was like before we knew you.

And, lord, we do choose this day now, just as an act of our will, to turn to you and say thank you.

Let's just thank him now, father.

We just thank you for who you are, lord, before we thank you for anything you've done.

We thank you for who you are.

Your majesty, your holiness, your perfection, father, your greatness and Lord, we are so grateful also not only because of who you are, but out of that character and nature, that you have poured out your love on us, who are undeserving but who are vulnerable and weak and under attack, and that you brought freedom into our lives.

And, lord, we pray that you would help us to live as those who are free free from sin and free from shame, and free from guilt and free from condemnation and free from the power of death.

Lord, we give our lives fresh and new to you this day and we ask that you would help us to get still and listen for the whispering wisdom of our King and Lord Jesus Christ.

We give you glory, father, in Jesus' name Amen.