God alone matters

Ecclesiastes 2.

Verse 11.

Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind, nothing was gained under the sun.

We're going to make our way through this chapter in a minute, but let's pray again.

Father, help us to understand your word.

And the really hard part.

Help us to do what it says.

In Christ's name.

Amen.

So we'll begin by asking you a question to think about.

This is actually a Bible question, right out of the book of James, chapter 4.

James 4 · chapter mention

That text asks, What is your life?

Now, what is the answer in James 4?

I'm hearing it.

It's a vapor.

Your life is short.

It's like a vapor, it's like steam coming out of the kettle.

It's like the morning fog.

It's just here for a moment, poof, it's gone.

Life is short.

Now it's hard for young people to get into that idea.

Young people think that everything is slow and it takes forever and life is really long.

And, you know, will I ever be old enough to get my driver's license?

And will I ever finish high school?

Will that preacher ever stop preaching?

I mean, I don't guess you have to be young to have that feeling.

But anyway, everything seems long and like drawn out.

But if you ask any older person on the planet, they disagree about all kinds of stuff.

But there's one thing we all agree about.

Life is short.

It gets here a lot faster than you can imagine.

I mean, just yesterday we were young looking at all those old people.

Now I'm here.

How did this happen?

It got here really fast.

But I want to dig into the question just a little deeper.

What is your life as in?

What is your life all about?

What do you live for?

What's important?

What drives you?

What are your dreams, your ambitions, your wishes?

What do you fantasize about and hope for if you decide to drift off in church and just daydream?

You wouldn't do that, would you?

Sit in church, look like you're paying attention and be gone.

I've never done that, but you might.

Where do you go?

What do you wish for?

And the reason I ask is because I'm convinced, and I think you'll agree with me, that a lot of us use up a lot of life's time and energy pursuing things that look pretty cool when they're in the future.

Well, if I could have one of those, if I could have that experience, if I could have that relationship, if I could have that opportunity, that would be sweet.

We dream of these things, but often those same things that seem to be to die for when they're in the future, sometime later, when you look back at them, you wonder why they were such a big deal to you.

I mean, even the younger people in this room, we probably have teenagers in here.

It wasn't that many years ago when you were dreaming, back when you were like three, you were dreaming of getting a big will for Christmas.

You know, if I could have a big will.

I have two daughters, my youngest is Tiffany.

We were living in the West Indies, uh, and she was growing up, and uh it was an island that didn't have any toy stores, and she had a wish.

She had found a picture of a hobby horse, or whatever you call a horse on springs.

And so she like, you know, and girls learn the art of manipulation of dad kind of early.

They get a little older and they have some sophistication about the manipulation, but not when they're young.

It's like, I love you, daddy.

You're the greatest daddy in all the world.

Buy me this horse, you know, it's just kind of obvious.

So so.

That's the second best amen I've gotten for the day.

That's good.

And so I wanted to get her one, but we didn't have a toy store.

And what I did know though is that come Christmas, the hardware stores and the grocery stores, everybody imported every kind of thing to sell for Christmas.

And so I promised my daughter that I would give her a hobby horse for Christmas.

Now she can't wait to Christmas, always asking, when is Christmas?

Well, a couple weeks before Christmas or a week before Christmas, I found out I had a problem.

I went down to the only big city on the entire island of St.

Vincent, Kingstown, and I went to every store in that little town, and they had every kind of thing in the world to sell except for hobby horses.

And I had a dilemma.

I'd made my daughter a promise.

She was so excited, she couldn't wait, and I didn't have any way to fulfill it because this was before FedEx arrived on our island.

They hadn't even invented the internet to have an Amazon yet.

I had made her a promise and I had no way to fulfill it.

It took about six months on a good time to get anything shipped.

Then I had an idea.

Now this turned out to be a dumb idea.

I called my buddy Don in Puerto Rico.

I said, Don, I need a big favor.

He said, What do you need?

I said, I need you to go down to Walmart and buy the best hobby horse they have and put it in your little private airplane and fly it down here to the West Indies to St.

Vincent.

He said, Well, if you'll pay for the fuel, I'll be happy to do it.

Well, having no idea how much aviation fuel costs and how much a little single-engine complaint can use up flying hundreds and hundreds in actually many countries.

I said, sure.

And I proceeded to buy the most expensive hobby horse in the history of the world.

Now my daughter was excited Christmas morning.

She got on that thing and she rode it furiously.

Her favorite word was instantly mine.

In her little three-year-old mind, life was now complete.

She had reached the pinnacle, she had everything she had ever imagined.

She guarded that thing selfishly.

Sister can't touch it, neighborhood kids can't touch it, it's mine.

But I noticed after a few weeks, she started letting her sister ride it.

And the neighborhood kids ride it.

And then some months passed, and no one was riding it very much.

And then it was like sitting over there in the corner gathering dust, and I started saying things like this Tiffany Grace Pettit, get on that horse and ride it now.

Or you will be punished.

One day we said to her after it sat there and not being touched by anyone, you know, the neighbors down here have a house full of kids and they don't have much.

They'd probably love to have that thing.

We give it to them.

Yeah, sure, Dad.

You know, sure, Dad.

After I put my life savings in it?

It wasn't that long ago.

You thought, you know, back when you were looking at it, wanting it, it was so awesome to you.

But not too long after you got it.

You're looking at a bicycle now.

I remember all those stages, you know, getting ready to be old enough to have a driver's license.

We need a car now.

Now I say all that because I believe there's a real danger in a room like this, probably amongst all of us, that we could make the mistake of living our entire lives that way.

That's something right now we're going for, something important, something we're trying to do or get or have or experience.

Wow, if I could just do that.

And maybe it happens, and you get it, you experience it.

You get the pat on the back, you get envy, you feel happy, and a little more time passes, and you look back and you think, why?

That's kind of silly.

Ah, but I'm going for this now.

That's silly.

Ah, but I'm going for this now.

And a lot sooner than you think, you get down here to the end of your life.

You're getting ready to go meet God now.

So one day you look back over your life that looks incredibly short.

And you say, I can't believe it.

I just spent up all of my little time pursuing things and thrills and theories and everything that looks so cool from over there, but from over here, it all just looks kind of silly, kind of cheesy.

Now, such is the story whose autobiography we call Ecclesiastes, or at least a man writing about parts of his life.

Um, a man who got everything he ever wanted.

But somewhere along the line, his wonder got broken.

As a young man, he wanted God.

It was all about pursuing God.

It was about the wisdom that God gives.

He writes a bunch of Proverbs, the Proverbs of Solomon, the man we're talking about when he's young.

And he talks in that book about the difference between wise people and fools.

And one of the biggest differences is how far they can see down the road.

The fool lives for the moment.

It's all about instant gratification.

It's all about today, tomorrow, next week, what I can get next.

But the wise person sees the impact of actions today and how they'll have an impact many years later and even into eternity and makes decisions now that will help in those.

He becomes king.

And this passion for God causes him to build this amazing temple so that the people of Israel and the surrounding nations would know that there's a God in heaven worthy of doing your best for.

A place of amazing worship.

And people from many other countries would come to Jerusalem and worship the true and living God because of this amazing temple.

It was all in about God, but somewhere along the line, he started moving away from his passion for God and more about his passion for himself.

And he gets to the end of his life and he writes Ecclesiastes.

And so I want us to go through and take a look at these different things that he lived for in this little process of trying this.

Oh, that's not any good.

Trying that, oh, that's not any good.

And so if you look in verse one, two, and part of verse three, you find words like laughter, pleasure, wine.

This is the life's a party philosophy.

Solomon could truthfully say, I spent a big chunk of my life going for wine, women, and song.

That was all I cared about.

And uh it gave me some pleasure, I had some happy times, I laughed a lot, but as we're going to see, now that I'm looking back at it, it just seems kind of empty.

It doesn't mean much to me anymore.

You also see in verse 3 the word wisdom.

Maybe the answer is in the pursuit of knowledge, of academics, of being superior to other people and what I know and how I can prove that, and how I can be so eloquent when I speak that people would want to clamor to hear me.

In verses four, five, and six, he lives for career success and the accomplishments that come out of career success and the things you can have.

Notice the plurals here.

It's not a house, it's houses.

It's not a vineyard, it's vineyards, it's not any singular.

In fact, he seems to have eye disease.

Look in verse 4.

I undertook great projects.

I built houses for myself and planted vineyards.

I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them.

I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees.

You get the idea who he's now all about.

Someone has well said there's only two choices on the shelf: pleasing God or pleasing self.

Everybody on this planet has to choose one of those.

You can't have both.

Have you ever dreamed of just getting really, really rich quickly?

You know, the reader's digest sweepstakes truck pulls up.

Or for some of you, the lottery truck pulls up.

Or maybe you're just out in the backyard and you're digging around and you come across a chest full of gold coins that somebody lost.

Nobody claims it, so it's yours.

Well, that wasn't Solomon's fantasy.

That was his reality.

He's extremely wealthy, one of the wealthiest people that ever lived in the history of the planet.

Verse 8 says, I amassed silver and gold for myself.

But but not just money.

He had the rare, the unusual.

It says, and the treasure of kings and provinces.

Yet Solomon would later write that those who live for silver are never satisfied with it.

The Bible never says anywhere that it's wrong to be wealthy.

But the Bible says in a lot of places it's silly to live for wealth.

If you make that choice, you'll never be satisfied.

Somebody says, Man, I have to have a million by the time I'm 30.

Well, if that's what he's living for, and he gets the million, guess what he now has to have?

That's right, he's not satisfied.

He has to have two.

He gets two, he needs five.

He gets five, he needs ten.

He gets a hundred million, he needs a billion, he gets one billion, he needs two billion.

You know, you find some of these billionaires and they ask him, What do you need now?

Another dollar before I die.

If you choose to live for that, you'll never really be satisfied with that.

If God blesses you with it and you use it for his glory and the things that matter in this world, that's fine.

But if you choose to live for it, you're not gonna be thrilled long term.

Verse 8, he has some of the things, the exquisite pleasures that money could buy him.

I acquired male and female singers and a harem as well.

He had about a thousand wives and concubines when you add it all up.

He said, all the delights of a man's heart, but as we're gonna see in a minute, it just leaves him empty.

Verse 9, he craves, or he has something, I should say, that many of us crave.

Fame.

A lot of us would like to have a little more respect.

Or maybe we actually desire to be famous.

I remember being in high school and early into college, and my fantasy was all about sports.

This time of year, I can imagine Pettit winning the Final Four with that last second shot.

I could imagine a football accomplishment and the crowd going wild, having the lights turned down, and when they announce my name and the spotlight shines on me, the crowd goes wild.

A lot of us would like to have just a little more respect when we walk into a conversation.

Maybe somebody, just listen to us.

Well, Solomon didn't fantasize about that.

He had the biggest fame you could possibly have.

He even had entourage and paparazzi.

I mean, everywhere he went, there was a big escort that went with him.

There were all these soldiers and fine horses.

It was a big deal.

And when he came to your town, everybody ran out there to the sidewalks.

Where's Solomon?

Oh, there he comes.

Look, woo-hoo! If they signed autographs back then, he would have signed thousands of them.

He's famous.

In fact, look at the way he said in verse 9.

I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me.

Verse 10 reads like what the epitome of our American dream sometimes becomes in lives.

The endless pursuit of stuff we think might make us happy.

If we have more stuff than other people, bigger, better, nicer stuff than other people, that's going to make us happy.

We don't know anyone who became happy that way, but it's going to make us happy.

And so look what he says.

I denied myself nothing.

My eyes desired.

I refuse my heart no pleasure.

You catch that?

Basically, if I saw it and I wanted it, I got it.

Or even if I just imagined it and wanted it, I got it.

I guess if he were writing this today, he would probably say something like, I was looking around the internet the other day and I noticed that Queen Elizabeth was selling her 450-foot yacht for 3 billion.

So I bought it.

Next week I'm going to buy a Mediterranean island.

That's what I've been thinking about lately.

Anything he saw and anything he wanted, he got it.

Now, many of us who have somehow bought the deception that that's that American dream fantasy is going to make us happy would imagine that the next verse should say, I died with the most toys, therefore I won.

But this is not an American fairy tale.

This is a real story about a real man who is taking a real look back at a real life with real regret.

So what does he really say?

What we read a few minutes ago, verse 11.

Then I looked.

Now, this is not a young man looking ahead, fantasizing, hoping, and wishing.

This is an old guy looking back, regretting.

When I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless.

Some verses say vanity, empty, futile, a chasing after the wind.

Nothing was gained under the sun.

You have two of the major themes of this entire book in one verse.

Under the sun, if you choose to live your life for things down here instead of for God and heavenly things, you're going to reach the conclusion that it was empty.

Now, um, I'm not a mind reader all the time, but I think I might try to read a mind this morning.

I need a volunteer who I could try to read.

How many of you think I can read somebody's mind?

Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

How many of you think I can't read anybody's mind?

How many of you are not going to raise your hand no matter what I ask today?

Sorry, Pastor Danny.

This is a tough, tough crowd right here, buddy.

Man.

Who'd like to be a volunteer?

Let me try to read your mind.

You scare me.

What kind of thoughts do you normally think?

How about we actually make this a little better?

How about we read everybody's mind?

Not just yours.

You're exciting, you're fun, but I want to read everybody's mind, not just yours.

Yeah, everybody's.

Thank you.

Let's give you my hand for coming up here.

I'm amazed.

I'd be terrified to have somebody read my mind.

I can get down here where I can see everybody.

Although that doesn't help the camera.

I'll get back up here.

I've got to make sure Danny knows what I'm doing.

Alright.

You ready to think an interesting thought?

Everybody ready?

Who is this guy and why do they invite him?

Why is he dressed like that?

And why is the other guy dressed like that?

This is crazy.

Exactly.

How many of you are already thinking that sometime today?

Alright, so here we go.

Actually, I'm not going to tell you what you're thinking right now, but I am going to tell you what you're going to think.

Okay?

That's easier.

Alright, here we go.

I predict that sooner or later, everyone in this room is going to think this.

You're going to reach this conclusion.

That God alone matters.

And that everything else is empty by comparison.

I am not saying anything else and everything else is wrong or sinful.

I'm just saying compared to God, it's empty and a chasing after the wind.

And you're going to reach that conclusion sooner or later.

I grew up on a farm in the western part of Virginia, a dairy farm.

If you're on a dairy farm, you're married to it.

Those cows are milked twice a day and they don't take a holiday.

They don't even take a Sabbath.

See, you can't go anywhere.

You milk the cows, you want to go somewhere, you better go fast because you've got to get right back and milk the cows again.

Now we didn't have a lot of money, but we did have some free entertainment.

Whenever it rained on the farm, we had these things created called mud puddles.

And we would splash around the mud puddles, man.

My brothers and I, we had a grand old time.

And my mother didn't really care very much for what it did to the clothes, but we played in the mud puddles.

Now, when I was 12 years old, hallelujah, we sold the family farm.

And we had our first real vacation of life.

My dad bought an old cab over camper and put it on the back of the pickup truck.

And we headed off to a magical destination.

We were headed to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

We were pumped, my brothers and I.

We were excited.

This was back before seatbelt laws.

And so we got to ride up there in the cab over part, looking through a little bubble window, going down the interstate, as high as the tractor trailers.

It was great.

We got to Myrtle Beach and we put in this place called Arrowhead Campground.

And that old pickup truck went back through that little sandy road.

I don't think I'd ever seen flat ground before.

We're going back through there, and we came out on the edge of the beach, and for the first time in my life, through a little bubble window, I saw it.

Now I had been to school.

I knew the ocean was big, but I wasn't ready for that big.

Overwhelming.

Dad stopped the truck.

My brothers and I scrambled out that little back door, ran around to the front of the truck, and just stood there gawking at the ocean.

Wow, look at that.

Woo! Look at those waves.

Look how far I got.

All the other tourists quit looking at the water and started looking at us.

Rednecks! We didn't care.

We were at the ocean.

We spent a week, had a grand time.

It was the best thing swimming, splashing, playing, get a little sunburned.

It was fantastic.

And I'm here to tell you that from the minute I saw the Atlantic.

Ocean until this morning.

I have never again been able to get excited about a mud puddle.

They just lost all interest to me.

I've been finding a little satisfaction in this thing called a puddle when there was this other thing called an ocean.

Probably why I was a missionary to an island for 10 years.

I could go spearfishing every week and be in that ocean.

I like that big ocean.

And some of you, if you're not careful, you're going to make the mistake of spending almost all of your life in this world's mud puddles.

Your problem is not that you like pleasure too much.

Your problem is that you're too easily pleased.

You're finding your satisfaction over here when all the little puddles the world dangles in front of you, and you grab for this one and you grab for that one.

And while you ignore the expanse called God, or maybe God is what you tack onto your life on Sunday morning and before meals.

And my whole message is simply this don't tack God onto your life.

Make him your life.

Add some other things as you go along.

Have some fun.

That's okay.

But don't live for those things.

Live for God.

Make him center and front and mane.

They called it the ice bowl because it was 13 degrees below zero when the game started, and then it got colder.

In fact, it was so cold that both teams had players who suffered sometimes serious frostbite.

Some had medical issues for the rest of their lives from that one game.

But it was an important game because the winner was going to go to Super Bowl number two.

So it was a lot riding on it as the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers met at Lambeau Field.

Somebody told me there's a rivalry here in this state about football.

Trying to remember the names of those teams.

I can't remember.

But uh some of you might remember though.

We better not get lost in the weeds here.

Um so back and forth the game went.

Finally, it's the end of the game, fourth quarter, time winding down, and the Cowboys are up 17-14, but Green Bay has the ball.

And so they kind of march all the way down the field and they get all the way to the Dallas one-yard line.

If they can move that ball another yard, score a touchdown, they're gonna win and go to the Super Bowl.

If they can't, it's gonna be the Cowboys.

So their famous coach, Vince Lombardi, caught a running play.

Handed the ball off, Dallas line stood up and drove them back.

Second down.

They ran another running play, handed the ball off, Dallas line rose up, drove them back.

Now third down, but now they have another problem.

The clock has gone all the way down to where there's only time left for one more play.

Big decision you have to make.

Vince Lombardi was known for being conservative.

Everybody expected him to do the safe thing.

Kick the tying field goal.

Try to win it overtime.

Be safe.

But instead, he went for the gamble.

He was going to try one more time to do what he hadn't been able to do in the last two plays.

Move the ball a yard.

Maybe because everybody was so frozen and people were so hurt and they just needed to end the game, but he actually called for another play instead of the field goal.

The call came into the huddle.

Quarterback sneak over right guard.

If you're not into football, I don't know how you can be down here and not be into football.

But anyway, if you're not into football, that basically means the ball is going to be snapped to the quarterback and the right guard is going to try to push the line back of the defense and create a hole so that the running back or the quarterback in this case can run through.

That right guard was Jerry Kramer.

He later wrote a book and he talked about the experience.

And about how when that call came in, that his pulse quickened because he knew the whole season came down to one play and his ability to do his job.

One last time, cowboy lineman, packer lineman, eyeball to eyeball, over one frozen yard of Green Bay turf.

If they could move that ball 36 inches, they were going to the Super Bowl.

35 inches or less, and they were going home in defeat.

The ball was snapped to Green Bay's famous quarterback, Bart Starr.

And Jerry Kramer did what he'd been doing all year.

He drove the Dallas line back into the end zone.

Created a huge hole.

You can actually go to the NFL Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, and see this on a giant screen.

Or you can just YouTube it in a few minutes.

I had done it.

I had carried my team to the Super Bowl.

He said, that's when it happened, really frustrating.

He said, I looked over and I watched my teammates grab Bart Starr and pick him up on their shoulders.

And my teammates all started saying, Bart, Bart, Bart.

Why is he getting all the credit?

My grandmother could have gone through that hole I just created.

His teammates cleared the bench and ran out, and they started yelling in the bigger huddle, Bart, Bart! The crowd picked it up.

Bart, Bart, Bart.

Oh my goodness.

He said, I was frustrated until I looked over at the Green Bay bench that was now empty, except for one guy.

Standing there was legendary coach Vince Lombardi, who had just coached his last game at Lambeau Field.

Not looking at the scoreboard or the Craze fans or my teammates.

Just standing there waiting for me to make eye contact with him.

He said, when our eyes met across that field, Lombardi gave me the biggest smile and thumbs up I had ever seen.

He said, it suddenly didn't matter what anybody else thought, because the one guy who really mattered had noticed.

He said it so inspired me that I jumped up off the field and I ran and joined my teammates, and I started yelling, Bart, Bart, Bart! Because the one guy who really mattered had noticed.

So we're going to end this simply.

God alone matters.

Don't add him to your life.

Make him your life.

Let's bow for prayer.

Well, Father, this is a little easier to preach than it is to live.

And we have a good example in Solomon, who lived to regret doing what most of us want to do.

And even though he did it at a much higher level than any of us will ever do it, he too realized a little too late because at the very end of the book, we didn't get to it this morning, but at the very end of the book, he writes it's all about God, fearing God, walking with God, obeying God.

That's the whole of man, the whole duty.

So, Father, I pray, first of all, for myself that I would live what I preach, because I'm always attracted to the mud puddles, too.

And Father, there's someone here who doesn't know Christ as Savior, has never been forgiven and washed in the blood of the Lamb, trusted in Jesus and what he did on the cross and through his death and through his burial and through his powerful resurrection that not only gives us hope for our own resurrection, but also gives us new life now.

I pray that person would come to Christ.

For all of us, you'd help us just to pause, think about where we are and where we need to go.

In Christ's name we pray.

Amen.