Chasing Smoke: Wisdom, Pleasure, & Work | Pastor Drew

I am excited.

Last week was a beautiful time together as we celebrated the promotions of our young people.

I am so excited to be able to have seen a couple of different promotions in our church.

I mean we're young, nine years old, and yet God is doing some incredible things through the incredible people who are committed.

Can we give our children's ministry and our nursery ministry a round of applause?

We are grateful for the work of the Anders and Andrew Sprock and all of the people who have committed their lives to serving our young people.

And so unless we do it, it just doesn't happen, and we're grateful for that.

And so two weeks ago, we began a series through the book of Ecclesiastes.

The book of Ecclesiastes.

And vanity of vanities.

All is vanity, or hevel, we talked about.

We learned that the Hebrew word hevel doesn't just mean meaningless.

It's more closely connected to vapor or smoke or even wind.

You can see it.

It's real.

But when you try to grab it, it just slips away from you, right?

That's this idea of hevel or vanity.

It's used many times throughout the book of Ecclesiastes and many times in the Old Testaments And so it's this preacher, the Koheleth, he begins his great experiment.

He says, Traditionally, Ecclesiastes is linked to Solomon as the teacher.

Right?

And when you read this section, it makes sense.

Who else had the resources, the wisdom, and the freedom to try everything life had to offer?

I want to pause right there and open up our time in prayer.

Lord, we come to you today.

We thank you for your word.

We thank you for your consistency and your steadfastness throughout human history.

We thank you that you have been the same God who has oversaw the sun in which we all live under.

You are the one who is above the sun.

And we thank you, God, that even now we will learn something about our lives.

We will learn something about work, wisdom, pleasure.

We'll learn something about the Spirit of God today.

And so we invite your Spirit not into this presence because your Spirit is already there and here, but we invite your Spirit into those places in our lives that we sometimes resist.

Holy Spirit, would you do your good work in us today, and may we respond faithfully to your word.

In Jesus' name, amen.

O Solomon! whenever I do leadership development and leadership training, I talk about the history of leadership in Israel, in the church.

And I talk about this idea of finishing well.

There's a case study done by a man by the name of Bobby Clinton.

He was a professor at Fuller Seminary for many years, and he was someone who studied 4,000 different leaders throughout history.

Many of them in the Bible, but some of them weren't.

And one of the things that he talks about is most leaders do not finish well during this time when he did this study with these 4,000 leaders out of 10 leaders what he discovered was was only three of them, three out of 10, finished well.

30% of leaders finish well.

They come to the end of the life, they remain faithful, they trusted God, they had integrity, they continued to grow, they committed themselves to community, they were humble, they listened, and they finished well.

Seven out of ten did not.

One of the things that we do not talk about in the church, as much as we love Solomon, one of the things that we don't really talk much about in the church is the fact that Solomon did not finish his life well.

Solomon got away from God.

The beauty behind this is I'm not God.

But I can think we can learn something from his life and his legacy and his story.

And although this is Ecclesiastes, I'm going to talk about Solomon a little bit today.

You know, God has this thing of doing things where God will give you what you ask for.

Sometimes God will give you the thing that you think is good for you and it's not.

He's like, oh, you want it?

Here you go.

Israel, you want to follow the pagan nations?

You know, what?

You guys want a king like them?

Here's Saul.

How'd that work out for you, Israel?

Not very well.

As a matter of fact, if you look at all of the kings throughout Israel, and then there was a split in Judah's history, you'll find out that there were not very many righteous kings.

Yahweh told them, you've got all you need in me.

I am that I am.

I am everything that you are looking for, but however, somehow, someway, you You need a king and guess what?

Here you go.

God sometimes does these things where God gives people stuff so that you can see that the thing that you thought you wanted wasn't the thing that you needed in the first place.

And that too is the goodness of God.

Some people's framework might be disoriented right now and that's part of it too.

So here we got Solomon.

Here's the irony here.

Tradition and Ecclesiastes is linked to Solomon, who has the resources, the wisdom, and the freedom to try everything life had to offer.

But here's the irony.

Long before Solomon ever sat on the throne, God gave instructions in Deuteronomy 17 about what Israel's kings must not do.

Uh-oh.

Don't multiply your horses.

He's talking about military power, military might.

I think this is interesting that this is part of the text today in light of a country that we serve, that we're part of, that all of a sudden we want to make a name change to our defense ministry.

It's supposed to be a ministry, by the way, a service ministry.

To call it the Department of War, if that isn't demonic, I don't know what demonic is.

If that is not demonic, what's happening in the world, it's not just here, I don't want to just center America, but I live in America, there's stuff happening in the world, it's crazy.

That's demonic.

But when you have a misguided understanding of the Christian faith in which we highlight people like Solomon, what you end up with in kings and horses, what you end up with is future leaders who do the same in the name of Jesus.

You know what else he says in Deuteronomy 17?

Don't multiply wives.

Hoo-hoo! Clock that! Clock that, baby! Don't multiply your wives.

It's actually not good for you to have all of these relationships with all of these women.

You can't be faithful to one.

What makes you think you're going to be faithful to 700 of them?

Come on, Solomon.

I don't need three wives.

Casey Jo Morrell is all I need and all I want, and I'm still trusting the Lord to figure out and understand how to love her better.

I don't need another wife.

500 more.

Oh, my gosh.

Woo! And so somehow in our culture of patriarchy or machismo, this is a human problem.

It's white, black, brown, rich, poor, middle class.

Some of my brothers who grew up poor just like me still can't remain faithful.

This is an issue with humans, baby.

Don't worry.

Apply to your wives.

God and his goodness and his grace allows things throughout history, but it was never God's original intention.

Uh-oh.

Now check this out.

My capitalistic friends.

Don't accumulate excessive silver and gold.

Don't accumulate more than what you need because eventually what happens is it becomes consumerism, and then consumerism turns into racism, then it turns into sexism, then it turns into classism, then it turns into ableism, and it turns into every other ism that you want to put out there because there's never enough.

We've got to create a need to have some the demand, and it's deeply, deeply dysfunctional.

And Solomon, who the Bible says is the wisest man on the earth, he broke all three of these.

He amassed horses from Egypt, 1 Kings 10.

He took 700 wives and and 300 concubines.

1 Kings 11, 3.

He piled up so much gold that silver was considered worthless.

I think there's a place in James, James the just, the brother of Jesus.

James says that your silver and your gold will testify against you.

That at judgment, the accumulation of the things that you had in life that you hoarded and that you did not share is going to testify.

God's going to bring it to the stand.

Fifteen cars in the driveway and you got three more ordered.

You're going to be the first one to get all three because you got so much money.

come to the stand?

Did sister so-and-so or brother so-and-so, did they own you and did they buy more?

Yes.

Did they drive past the poor every single day?

Yes.

Were they generous with people?

No.

Could they have used some of that accumulation or a lot of that accumulation of stuff to actually address the disparities in their own community, their own family, in their own country, and in their own world?

Yes.

Pray for grace.

And let me tell you this, this is not a rich or poor, black, white, or brown problem.

This, again, is a human problem.

I know rich folks that accumulate and hoard, and I know poor folks that accumulate and hoard because they're watching the rich and they think that the rich is the answer, and both of them miss God! Don't accumulate excessive.

We all should be convicted by this.

All of it is hevel.

This is the verdict.

He gave himself to wisdom, to pleasure, and to work more than anyone else in history, and here is the verdict, and it's daunting, haunting.

All of it is hevel.

All of it's smoke.

Doesn't mean anything.

Chasing after the wind.

Smoke slipping through my fingers.

So let's talk about something.

Let's talk about wisdom.

In this text, we can't read all of this text today.

We'd be here tomorrow.

So I want to encourage you all to make sure this week that you read Ecclesiastes chapter 1.

Ecclesiastes 1 · chapter mention

Verse 12 through all of chapter 2, 26 verses in chapter 2.

So this week your homework is to make sure that you read this.

I'm going to touch on it, but you're going to need to read this this week.

So, we're going to start with the first thing.

The scripture says that it's all futility, chasing after the wind.

Wisdom, this thing about wisdom, go back to the point here, the search for wisdom, it's more knowledge.

Here the text, let's read the passage here.

I put something on here.

I said to myself, behold, I have magnified and increased wisdom more than all who were over Jerusalem before me.

In my mind has observed a wealth of wisdom and knowledge.

And I set my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly.

I realized that this also is striving after the wind.

Knowledge.

Chat GPT.

Google search.

Every single Bible application in the Greek and Hebrew throughout time that's available online.

All of the academic studies through our schooling and our life.

That third grade social studies class that you loved.

All of it.

You can see it.

But when you try to grab it, it slips through your hand.

Now hear me clearly.

Wisdom is not a bad thing.

But if it's the only thing, it's in vain.

Solomon was the wisest man alive.

His fame stretched across the world.

1 Kings 4, 29 through 34.

And yet, he says, with much wisdom comes much sorrow.

The more knowledge...

the more grief.

When some people say, I don't care to know all of those things, I actually appreciate that.

Because what they're saying is all of that information that you're about to give me, I can't even handle what I got now.

So I'll let y'all take that while I continue to focus on what I'm just trying to do with what I got right now.

Amen?

I don't need nothing extra.

I don't need more scrolling.

I don't need more searches.

I don't need more Googles.

I can't even do what I want to do with the stuff that I have right now.

Why would I want more knowledge?

And then you get more knowledge.

And you get more grief in the journey of pursuing justice in the world I'm also more and more and more aware of the realities of injustice throughout the world.

And man, it's painful.

Man, I see why people are on drugs.

Man, I see why people are on Amazon shopping carts all the time just trying to bypass time and anxiety and all.

I'm just being, I mean, I got some friends and family members who's just like, you know what?

Give me that.

Woo! Ow! truly get it, and I'm not knocking anybody.

The things in life are so painful that how are we going to deal with these things?

The more that we know, the more pain we feel, and who wants to feel more pain when I've got all of this unprocessed pain already in my life?

Why would I want to take on?

And let me tell you this, church.

Some of you may sometimes wonder why, as we are a church that talks about reconciliation, justice, right?

We talk about these things and what it means for us to be reconciled across to ethnic boundaries and class boundaries and gender boundaries and all of these things.

We're working through these things, right?

But one of the things that I have realized along the journey is that some people can't even deal, haven't even dealt with their own family upbringing and their own family system.

How can I expect them to understand the knowledge of another people group or history when, man, daddy, mama wasn't there.

They were abused.

They were molested.

They had a lot of trauma in their life.

Man, they're just trying to get through today and they can't even handle that.

I actually, I got mercy for that, actually.

It's what trauma can do to us.

It kind of narrows our understanding, and we're just trying to deal with the thing that's right in front of us.

So when people aren't ready to move forward in more dialogue and more conversations, don't write them off as somebody who wants to be a white supremacist.

or somebody who doesn't care or somebody who doesn't know Jesus.

I've done this at times in my life, and I've been wrong.

You've got to understand that humans are humans, and what we do is we're really good at humaning, which also means that we have limitations.

And that doesn't mean that we still don't pursue it because it's what's right.

But maybe if we slow down a little bit and we enter into their story and we enter into their wounds and help them along their journey, they actually might be a little more open to hearing what you have to say.

We live in a community, I don't know if y'all know this or not, to give you some knowledge, some wisdom.

28,000 people.

28,000 people here.

4,000 people here, African American, biracial.

You have about 3% of this population that's Latino and is growing, right?

And then you have a small Asian population.

Very, very small indigenous population.

But the reality is most of our community is white.

And let me say this too.

There's a lot of poverty in our community.

I grew up black, white, Latinos, a lot of biracial people.

You know what we all had in common?

We were all poor.

That's why we actually live by each other.

So then, it's hard for some people to understand bigger systems when they're just trying to get through the day.

And if we don't understand this as a church, we are going to miserably fail.

And we've had moments at times when we've centered certain things.

I have been guilty of this, and I'm sorry, but we've done some things to where we haven't been open and we haven't thought about other perspectives.

We haven't seen a bigger picture, and it's caused harm at times.

All that wisdom, man.

It's nice, but it also can be extremely painful with what we do with it when we're not the stewards of it.

With much wisdom comes so much sorrow.

The more knowledge, the more grief.

Wisdom is good, but it cannot stop death.

Wisdom is good, but it cannot fix injustice.

Wisdom is good, but it cannot erase sorrow.

Like smoke, wisdom looks solid, but it slips away.

I think it's interesting that many of the professors that I had in school for theology, or not theology, he was pretty solid actually, but for evangelism and discipleship, they had all these degrees and these doctorates, and I think that that stuff is really good.

Pursue it.

If that's what God's calling you to, don't think that's the answer.

But many of them were detached from the reality in this community.

And it's like, how are you teaching discipleship and evangelism, man?

And you don't know that three of my friends were just shot last week.

What kind of discipleship is this?

How are you teaching evangelism when you won't talk about the realities of the things that impact the poor in our community?

That ain't no good news, man.

You need to talk about these things so people can actually believe that God cares.

her response.

But people have all these degrees, and I'm just like, you're teaching what?

Evangelism what?

Man, you ain't been across the street, and you don't try to tell me about evangelism?

So church, wisdom, we can pursue it.

But we must also know that in itself, it is not enough.

In and of itself, just finding the answers, the five on Enneagram if you're an Enneagram person, which is a way to understand personalities.

If you're a researcher and you like more and more wisdom, that five, I go to a five when I'm in a better place and I go to learn more.

And some of you, like, somebody asks you a question and, like, you don't want to answer because you don't know and you feel, like, embarrassed and you're like, let me step out for a second.

Let me go Google the answer.

Let me go find out.

And then you come back into the question confident, right?

Even that smoke because sometimes what we just need to do is open ourselves up and be vulnerable and say I don't know teach me I don't know help me to understand what I don't see because I actually need you wisdom means nothing if we don't have each other second piece is Solomon man there's a second piece here is the search for pleasure, right?

He's saying that all of these things, he's come to the end of his life, he writes this, and he says all of these things are smoke.

The search for pleasure, if you're an Enneagram person, this is my people right here.

These are the Enneagram.

If you want to know more about the Enneagram, just type it up.

Find a free assessment and just look it up.

The idea about the Enneagram is it's a way to learn how to love other people well.

Yeah, you can learn more about yourself, but it's really about other people.

And it shows you.

Ways in which that we have learned how to cope.

It shows, it exposes our brokenness.

It shows some of our gifts, but oftentimes we just come from the point of gifts, but it actually shows our brokenness in the ways that we have learned how to navigate the world.

I have learned how to navigate the world through pleasure.

Pleasure junkie.

Solomon said here, I said to myself, come now, I will test you with pleasure.

So enjoy yourself, and behold, it too was hevel, or futility.

Also I collected for myself silver and gold and treasure of kings and provinces.

I provided for myself male and female singers and the pleasures of men, many concubines.

He's talking about sensual pleasure here, sexual pleasure.

That is what he's talking about here.

I want to be very clear about this, because our sexuality sometimes leads us into making poor choices in our bodies, with our bodies, to other bodies.

And we're seeking pleasure in our body and pleasure in and of itself, it's in vain.

And it causes a lot of harm and damage to people.

Abortions.

Not shaming anybody, but I'm going to talk about my story.

By the time I was 19, three abortions.

Now, I've come to accept the grace of God, but it's a reality.

I still feel the pain of it.

By the time I was 19, started when I was in sixth grade.

Oh, man, this is what happens.

Growing up in poverty, you're vulnerable.

And then before you know it, you're raising yourself.

And then I found out things that I shouldn't have known about at that early of an age and the stuff that we got to talk about to our children because I can I promise you this, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, other kids in the neighborhood and at the park, even if you think they love Jesus, I guarantee you this stuff's coming up.

We would be foolish to believe that our kids are not having conversations around these things.

Pastor, you got to watch what you say.

Okay, you can control that if you want to and you think you control it, but that too is hell.

If you think that you're controlling every conversation, everything, and you can buy your kids one of them phones that ain't got, not even a smartphone, one of them flip phones that you control, you can do that if you want to, but I promise you, they'll find other ways.

to navigate I became go back great and increased more than all who preceded me in Jerusalem my wisdom also stood by me keep going all that my eyes desired I did not refuse all that my eyes desired I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure for my heart was pleased because of all my labor and And this was my reward for all of my labor.

Oh, man.

Rock and roll, drugs, and all the other things, or whatever it is, right?

He's saying, man, I'm giving into the flesh, baby.

This feels good.

And this is the reward for my labor.

Ravi Zacharias, who was a famous theologian and speaker for the church, after he dies, it finds out that he's going to these massage parlors.

He's going to these massage parlors and he's not just getting a massage.

And he's a voice for God all across the world.

One of the things that we found out in this is that one of the reasons why he did this is that he believed that God owed him some reward for his labor.

something human within us that desires pleasure and there's something good in pleasure.

But pleasure in and of itself is vanity.

It's meaningless and it leads us to destruction.

I considered all my activities which my hands had done in the labor which I had exerted and behold it was vanity.

All was vanity and striving after when there was no profit under the sun.

Next one.

That's it.

Solomon tried laughter, wine, gardens, music, sex, silver and gold.

He lived the life we secretly dream about, endless vacations, unlimited resources, no restraint at all.

But he says, when I surveyed all that my hands had done, everything was smoke, chasing after the wind.

Nothing was gained under the sun.

The warning against multiplying wives was not about numbers alone, but about divided hearts, and Solomon's heart was led astray.

Friends, brothers, and sisters, pleasure is sweet, but I can promise you this, it never satisfies the soul.

That's why you keep doing it, and you keep doing it, and you got to do more, and you got to do more, and you got to do more, and you got to create other ways to do more of it, because it's never enough.

Our hearts, our desires need to be reformed by God.

Then we get to work.

Oh, don't worry.

The wisdom and then the pleasure, and many of you are going to school.

Many of us are working full-time jobs, part-time jobs.

Some of us are business owners, and some of us want to be business owners.

I'm a pastor.

Some of us are ministry leaders.

And so our work is whatever we do to make a living.

That is our work, our job, our career, what you're doing.

to make a living.

He says that even this is hell.

Oh man, this is bad news.

I mean, this doesn't even serve it.

Is there anything that's got meaning in life?

I mean, the wisdom, the pleasure, I mean, my job, I mean, God, is there anything that gives me value or meaning?

I'm glad you asked.

We'll get there in a moment.

But this is like, man, this is the bad news.

It's only bad news if you won't repent.

Repentance, the word metanoia, is the word to change your mind about something.

You change your mind, and part of the challenge in our day today is we believe that somehow, someway, because of this or that, that somehow I don't have to repent.

And the reality is, is repentance is a universal.

invitation.

I don't care who you are, what you look like, what you have done, what you've done, period.

Ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, orientation, married, single, poor, middle class, upper, I don't care what it is, whatever it is that makes human human, you put it there and every one of those people are called by God to repent.

To change our minds.

about where we're going and what we believe and to trust something bigger than us.

Solomon poured himself into his work, building palaces and cities, right?

I'm going to read this passage from work now.

Thus I hated all the fruit of my labor for which I had labored under the sun, for I must leave it to the man who will come after me.

And we know whether, and who knows whether it will be a wise man or a fool, yet he will have control over all the fruit of my labor for which I have labored by acting wisely under the sun, man, this too is vanity.

Is there another one?

That's it.

Go back.

Go back.

Toil.

Labor.

Solomon poured himself into work.

He built palaces, cities, armies, armies, and yet here Solomon...

is lamenting.

He's pausing for a moment to say, man, I wasted a lot of resources.

I wasted a lot of power.

Power is not a bad thing, folks.

Power is actually a good thing.

The fact that God gives us human agency to make decisions that affect change, that is a good thing.

The problem with power is when it's misguided and misdirected and we use it for selfish reasons or for only our group of people, whether it be rich or whoever it might be.

That's the problem with power is that we misuse power and we don't steward it correctly.

is not a bad thing.

We all have some form of power or privilege in our life.

And what we do with it matters.

And Solomon comes to the end of his life and he's like, man, I really caused a lot of harm and chaos for someone who's supposed to be the wisest.

Nobody's wiser than me.

Man, is my wisdom even really hitting on anything?

He worked himself to the bone, baby! That's probably why he needed so many cards and wise because we're only meant to have so much of anything, right?

We can't have too much and sometimes when our lives are disoriented or out of balance and we're trying to get something that it can't offer out of something, we're trying to pursue something in such a way that we're trying to pull salvation out of work or out of relationships or out of wisdom or out of our degrees or out of our money or out of our house or out of ministry or out of being a pastor.

We're trying to pull something out of it that it never promised and what happens is we're let down and so then As human beings who also, pleasure's not a bad thing, it's also a gift from God, we seek pleasure in the wrong places to overcompensate for where we're lacking.

I see it so many times.

You know why people struggle with porn so much?

It's not just about sexuality.

It's because people are empty in other areas of their life, and they're searching for intimacy, and they go to it because they don't have meaningful relationships with people.

You know why people struggle with greed?

It's because they haven't learned how to have relationships with people that are based on equality and equity and love and mutuality, and what happens is they take more than what they need at the expense of others.

That's why greed exists, when if we would just be with each other, love each other, and listen to each other, you would realize That many of the answers are just right here between us.

But we end up working to the bone.

We neglect relationships when we do that.

Whether it's marriage.

children.

And don't let this be people in power who are doing this because crap always rolls downhill.

So then you got human beings who are deprived of meaningful relationships and they find their identity in their work and then accumulation of things and money and more wisdom and more work and they work 60, 70, 80, 90.

I mean there's some people I see them so I'm like man do you ever sleep?

We wonder why we can't sleep.

And we wonder why we have so much anxiety.

This stuff is all connected, brothers and sisters.

We're operating at a pace that we cannot keep up with when we never were supposed to.

And unfortunately, when people take more than what they need at the expense of others, it creates massive problems in the world, in our country, in our communities.

And we find ourselves working and working to the bone.

He says, You grab it, and it doesn't offer you any salvation.

I can promise you, man, you're thinking about this career.

You're going to school, and you can't wait to be whatever this thing is.

And I promise you, once you get it, if you put too much stock in that thing, you're going to be let down in a couple of years, and you're going to find yourself depressed and anxious.

And then you're going to turn to other outlets in life that don't fulfill.

And the next thing you know, man, you're way over here.

Why is it that Christian marriages have the same divorce rate as the world?

Why?

Is it working?

Is this actually working?

The need to be great.

It's smoke.

It doesn't work and what happens is your need to be great, you realize that you're a human and you can only do so much and you push yourself to the bone and you push other people to the bone and next thing you know, we're all hurting.

This happens in church and ministry too.

One of the things that I want people in ministry to know that at any point in time that you're doing too much, you can step away.

You're not going to be condemned.

We don't want people here just for their gifts.

That's vanity.

That's hevel.

We want you for your presence and out of your presence There's gifts that you have to offer, but we want you for you.

It's vanity otherwise.

Then we find ourselves building churches that people don't love each other.

That's vanity, man.

And that will stand before the throne of God.

Death erases resumes.

Success fades from memory.

And then wealth ends up in someone else's hand.

Work is important, but it won't last forever.

The last part of this is the most important part.

Just two verses here.

The surprising gift here.

There is nothing better for a man than to eat and drink and tell himself that his labor is good.

This also I have seen that it is from the hand of God.

For who can eat and who can have enjoyment?

without him.

The problem is we pursue wisdom, pleasure, and work without God.

And we do all this for a long time only to find out that we wasted a lot of our life pursuing the wrong things.

But there's good news.

After chasing wisdom, pleasure, and work to their breaking point, the preacher turns a corner, and he says what I just read you.

It's this idea is to stop grasping and start receiving.

The good life doesn't come from chasing.

It comes as a gift from God's hand.

My dad and I don't have a great relationship, never have.

I hope one day we will, but the ball's not in my court, maybe, and maybe I need to be seen about that, right?

Maybe it Maybe I need to be open to that too, right?

But one of the things I can tell you about with my dad, I was a young boy who grew up without a daddy, had a daddy wound.

And so throughout my life, I've just gone out and done things because just people, you know, got all these excuses.

I just go do it.

You know, I just, I ain't got time for it now.

I ain't the only one in here like that.

And don't be a woman or a person of color who is already struggling to try to just make things happen or somebody who comes from poverty.

It's even worse.

It's just like, you get out of the way.

I got this because you ain't going to do it.

But part of that is trust.

Part of that is trust that I had to learn how to And so what happens is, as a young man, you grow up and you feel alone most of your life.

You just start meeting your own needs.

You know, I can't trust the people in my life to meet them.

I just got to meet them myself, right?

And I did this in so many different ways that were unhealthy for me.

If I wanted something, I just did it.

I didn't ask nobody else because my life has been shown that people weren't there for me.

But that wasn't always true, and that wasn't true most of the time, actually.

I just needed to open my eyes up.

One day, I went and bought something.

And my dad said to me, he said, son, you need to stop taking stuff and let somebody give it to you.

That changed something in me that day.

And it began to begin to change in a way that I began to think differently about other people in my life.

and to allow people to offer me things and to actually share my needs with other people and to open my life up.

And I also have to be okay with the fact that people sometimes can't meet my needs.

That's also a reality.

It's an unreasonable expectation to think that somebody's going to meet all your needs.

This is why marriages struggle now because we're trying to get Jesus out of our spouse.

The math ain't mathing.

Some of you are trying to get Jesus out of your kids.

The math ain't mathing.

You can't get Jesus out of wisdom, you can't get it out of pleasure, and you can't get it out of your job.

The math never, ever, maths.

Not your career, not your money.

Here, stop grasping.

Start receiving.

The good life doesn't come from chasing.

It comes as a gift from God's hand.

Before moving to this conclusion, I want you to know something here that we see this idea of hevel and this wind.

This word is connected to the root word for ruach, which is the same word in the Old Testament for the Holy Spirit.

The ruach of God, the breath of God, the wind of God.

And I think it's interesting how how smoke and the Holy Spirit have the same root word in ruach.

There's something beautiful about this.

We see Solomon grabbed everything.

Maybe he didn't get it because his daddy was too busy doing all the things that he was doing.

He couldn't give it to his son, so Solomon might have said, you know what, I'm going to go get it myself.

And so he grabs and he grabs and he grabs and he grabs and he grabs and then he inherits the throne, so he does more grabbing, right?

But this is us if we're not paying attention.

This is very same thing can be us.

I think that there's something unique here in the book of John.

I think that the book of John, chapter 3, verse 8, it says this.

John 3:8

It says, the Spirit of God, the same Ruach, is not something that we chase, but it's the one that actually pursues us.

Jesus tells the disciples, the wind blows wherever it pleases.

He's talking to Nicodemus, actually, a man who's seeking God and been doing a lot of good things to get God.

He's and grasping.

This is part of why religion doesn't work.

God is seeking us in Jesus Christ.

The wind blows wherever it pleases.

You hear it sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.

So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.

Friends, the good life under the sun is not something that we can manufacture.

It's something given.

It's a gift.

God's Spirit pursues us, moves in our hearts, opens our eyes to joy, wisdom, and meaning that don't vanish like smoke.

The reality is this.

Jesus rejected worldly power.

When offered the kingdoms of the world, he said, worship the Lord your God and serve him.

Only Jesus remained faithful under Tim to take on worldly power.

Jesus remained faithful to his one bride, the church, with no divided heart.

Jesus refused to cling to wealth.

Though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor so that by his poverty might you become rich.

On the cross, Jesus entered the smoke of futility for all of human existence, death even itself.

But in his resurrection, he broke the cycle in him, in Jesus, the resurrected one, the Lord, the Savior, the King of kings, in Jesus, wisdom becomes life-giving, pleasure becomes holy joy, work becomes labor that is not in vain.

Sisters and brothers, I want to invite you today to receive your identity in Christ that begins in the finished work of the cross.

The most important day of creation is the seventh day.

Why?

Because it's the day that God wanted humanity and all of creation to understand.

that their identity was in what he had already done and not in what they do.

And anytime you try to work for God's love, it's smoke.

Jesus is pursuing us.

The Holy Spirit is moving in on our lives continually.

Will we stop resisting the Holy Spirit today?

Stop chasing smoke.

Control, pleasure, achievement, security, none of it lasts.

There are guardrails in Deuteronomy 17.

Are you multiplying horses in your life?

Don't just look at our president.

Our president is a reflection of us.

He's a human being created in the image and likeness of God, just like you.

Our president is a reflection of us.

And if you can't connect that, you might need another set of eyes to see.

Are you multiplying lives, pleasure in relationships?

Are you seeking pleasure in your relationships as the end goal and not the person and not their presence?

Are you multiplying gold?

Are you finding your identity in your wealth and in your security or chasing after it?

Today, I want to invite you to receive joy as a gift from God.

Not grasping, but being grateful.

This is the pathway to joy under the sun.