Sermon Transcript
Well, we’re going to look back at Ecclesiastes again this morning. If you’ve been with us, we’ve been in a study in Ecclesiastes, and we come to chapter 8 today, chapter 8, verse 2 and following. So find it in your Bible. It’s on The Message note sheet if you can read in that small a font, but you can enjoy at least the verses that are there. And follow along in the notes if you want, or pick out a— take out a Bible or the one in front of you there.
One of the things that Solomon comes to is the matter of control. Given the choice between living in a circumstance that we can control or a circumstance that we can’t control, I think that we would probably choose the circumstance that we could control. I mean, I can look around at you and think about circumstances that many of you have faced where it was out of your control, and those are not the things that we like to be faced with. We’d like to have some sense of control over things. And I think that just goes back to our upbringing and part of our sinful nature, I think, in some ways, just the desire to be in control.
You could probably think back to times where if this wasn’t you, you can think of other children, but where you disagreed with your parents. They wanted a certain thing and you wanted something else, and it was a question of control. Are they gonna be in control? Or I gonna be in control? You know that whole dilemma?
This goes all the way back to early childhood where the parents wanted you to eat something and you didn’t wanna eat that something, or they wanted you to go to bed at a certain time and you didn’t wanna go to bed at that certain time. And so really this whole control issue comes up. There’s an interesting video that came up in March on YouTube concerning Parents putting their 2-year-olds to bed. I don’t know if you saw this, it went viral, but it was an interesting night because they put the kids in bed and then this played out.
2-year-olds.
Here are the parents.
Yeah, this goes on for another 90 seconds. The parents come back again, put them back in. They get up again. They’re not about to miss out on their slumber party. You know, 2 years old and they’re already having an all-night party and aren’t gonna go to sleep regardless of how their parents feel about things.
This is enough to, you know, make you not wanna have children or have a different perspective on your children or whatever it is. But when you sign up, you know, to have children, you sign up to have this interesting battle with control. It’s just, it’s part of life, right? We, Bernice and I, a week and a half ago, we had a couple stay in our home. They were traveling through the area.
Actually, Ruthie’s sitting right there. She had sent a message out and said, can anybody host this family for a night? And so we said, yeah, if it’ll work out. And there were 5 of them. And so they came over and we had a really nice evening together.
But part of the discussion was just focused on their ministry in South Sudan. And the incredible things that they’ve seen God do there, but then they just went through an out-of-control situation where the refugees that are around them and the tribes got into a battle, a civil war they said, and there were gunshots outside their home and people were taking cover and for them, they just had to basically lay on the floor for, they said, a couple of days in order to find any kind of safety. That was the only safety that they had for a couple of days, and then there was a pause in the shootings, and so they were able to, at that point, you know, hopefully get out, and they did get out. They were evacuated by airplane. A lot of the missionaries were taken out.
They went to Nairobi, Kenya, and were able to stay there, and then they made their way back here to the United States. But they left behind their home. So when they evacuated, they evacuated their home and all of the possessions. Why did they do that? Because of an out-of-control situation.
It was not something that they can control. But the thing that they brought to our attention was this wasn’t the first time that this happened. This is the third time. The third time they’ve lost their home, the third time that they’ve lost their possessions. They’ve gone back to the area as they’ve gone back when things changed and it was safer conditions, but they’ve seen actually their furniture in the police department and other places like that.
I mean, can you just imagine this? That’s my furniture, and now it’s not your furniture, and so they’ve had to deal with all of the circumstances connected to all of that. And so at one point I asked them, you know, does it get any easier? I mean, the 3rd time losing your home and losing all of your stuff, does it get any easier? He said no.
She said yes. And I thought, well, that’s, that’s interesting. I guess it really kind of has to do with your perspective on your stuff and how you’re working through all of this, and I think that’s probably pretty typical. We can face an out-of-control circumstance and respond differently to that circumstance, and obviously for us, it’s probably not gonna be a circumstance where there’s people shooting outside your home and you gotta take cover for a couple of days, but there are other circumstances that come our way. It could be health-related.
You didn’t think this was going to happen, whatever the disease has been that you’ve been struggling with, whatever the circumstances have been there, but it’s out of your control. Career, it could be something related to the career where, you know, you never thought it was gonna go this direction and it has, and maybe you even lost your job. It was not in your control. Could have something to do with school. It could even have something to do with the college that you get into.
You try your best, you’ve done the best that you can, but there’s a point there where it’s out of your control. It could have to do with the family and the conditions your family is in right now and what’s going on in the family, and you would like things to be different than they are, but it’s out of your control. Or it could have to do with the nation that we’re living in and the circumstances today that are part of our nation and where we are as a nation. It’s out of our control. Or it could have to do with just your commute, you know, I mean the commute that you take.
You would like to find a different route but there aren’t any other routes or the other routes that we take are just as slow and it’s, it’s, it’s out of our control. So we’re going to look at a passage this morning that deals with this whole problem of life that’s out of our control and our response to it. And so the man’s learning, Solomon, King Solomon’s learnings can really be helpful to all of us. This is how he begins Ecclesiastes chapter 8, verse 2. Obey the king’s command, I say, because you took an oath before God.
Do not be in a hurry to leave the king’s presence. Do not stand up for a bad cause, for he will do whatever he pleases. And you might underline those words. He, the king, will do whatever he pleases. Since a king’s word is supreme, Who can say to him, what are you doing?
Whoever obeys his command will come to no harm, and the wise heart will know the proper time and procedure, for there is a proper time and procedure for every matter, though a man’s misery weighs heavily upon him. What’s fascinating here is that you’ve got a king, King Solomon, writing about a relationship with a king, and essentially what he’s saying here is that we need to realize we can’t control the king. You can’t control the king. I can’t control the king. Ultimately, a king, talking about, you know, somebody who’s autocratic in their leadership, ultimately a king does what he or she, or in this case he, wants to do or doesn’t want to do.
So it’s not what pleases you, it’s what pleases the king. And since his decisions are supreme, and since the king is the final authority, It does no good to call him into question. Verse 4, you see that? What he does or does not do is what he wants to do. It’s up to him.
So don’t say, Solomon says, what are you doing? Saying that could actually put you, verse 5, in harm’s way. You could get into trouble with the king if you backtalk with the king or you question his course of action. In fact, he says the best course of action, verse 1, is to obey the king and is to keep the king’s vows or the vows that you have made to the king. Keep your vows and keep your commitments and show, verse 3, show respect and show honor to the king.
In fact, don’t even be in a hurry to get out of his presence. And when I think about those words there, I sometimes think about how sometimes, you know, you’re with somebody and you’re having a conversation, but things aren’t going your way and it’s out of your control and you just wanna get out of there as fast as you can. You just wanna make a statement even by getting out of there. You might even slam the door on the way out, I have no idea. But the picture here is that there’s something here that possibly can be learned from the king if you wouldn’t hurry out of his presence.
Or maybe God wants to do something in your heart in a different way. Maybe it’s gonna be a teachable moment for you as you submit to authority right now. So don’t be in a hurry to get out of the person’s presence. And don’t stand up against him with some others that you’ve now rallied to your side, he’s also suggesting here. And don’t approach this at the wrong time.
If you got a problem with the king or you got something you wanna talk to the king about, you better find the right time and use the right approach. You see that? There’s a proper time and there’s a proper approach for everything because if you don’t take the proper time and approach, you’re gonna have a bigger problem than you have right now. And if you think life is miserable for you right now, even though you have some misery, even though you want an answer to your circumstance right now, it’s gonna actually be worse if you don’t get a handle on your control. So basically what you’ve got is you’ve got a king who is over you.
Now, we don’t, you know, as far as I know, have a king. We have a president who’s over us. We have a boss who’s over us. Parent who’s over us, perhaps a brother or sister, you know, we’re the young one in the family and it’s the brother or sister who’s making my life miserable right now, or it’s the CEO, or it’s the police officer, or it’s the teacher, or whatever it is, the point here is if you’ve got somebody over you, there’s a good chance that you’re in a position or you’re in a situation that you can’t control. You can’t control them because ultimately they’re going to do what it is that they want to do.
If they’re the king, they’re gonna do whatever it is they want to do. If you were the king, you could do whatever it is that you want to do, but you’re not the king. You’re not the king of the mountain. You’re not the lion king. We were at the zoo a couple weeks ago, Bernice and I, with 5 of our grandkids, and while we were there, we saw this lion get up on top of one of these man-made mountains that they have at the zoo, and it’s kind of this open safari kind of area where all these different animals were, and it was really beautiful to be a part of that.
We had first come to a viewing area that had the glass window and you’re kinda behind it, but the animals didn’t wanna come over by the window to show us that they were there, so ultimately we had to move to another area, and when we got to this area, we saw this lion, and it was hanging out on the grass, but then it decided to move, to relocate, and it relocated, and the funny thing was, is it relocated to the tallest mountain that was there and laid down and then looked out all over the other animals, the elephant, the giraffe, the hippopotamus. I mean, it’s like looking out over everybody because it’s in control, the picture is. Well, there it is. There’s gonna be a lion in your life. You may be able to influence ’em, but you’re not ultimately going to be able to control them.
Because people do what they wanna do, especially those who are in authority. And the sooner we learn that lesson that we’re not gonna be able to control those who are in positions of authority over us, who are in a king kind of position, the better it is for us. In other words, we gotta make an adjustment. Some of you can think about that in relationship to your parents. You wanted your parents to do something different than they said they were gonna do, and you had to make an adjustment.
I can remember this with my parents. I remember many times them asking me to do something that I didn’t wanna do, and you know what I ultimately discovered? That if I changed my attitude, made an attitude adjustment, that things went better in the home. I ultimately discovered that.
It’s the same kind of thing with people that are in control over us. Make the adjustment. Accept the fact you’re not in control. You can influence them, but ultimately you’re not in control. He goes on and he says this, since no man knows the future, who can tell him what is to come?
No man has power over the wind to contain it, so no one has power over the day of his death. As one is discharged in time of war, so wickedness will not release those who practice it. All this I saw as I applied my mind to everything done under the sun. There is a time when a man lords it over others to his own hurt. Now what’s he talking about here?
He’s talking about the future. He’s talking about coming events, ones that, verse 7, we can’t predict. I mean, we can’t predict what the future’s gonna do. We can talk about the economy and say, I think maybe, but you know, we can’t predict it. Nature, verse 8, that’s out of our control.
We can’t control winds. I mean, we can kind of get a sense of what’s going on, but, you know, listen, when a tornado comes through Texas as it did yesterday and causes devastation and injury and death, that’s out of our control. In fact, death itself is out of our control, and you notice that in verse 8. We would like to eliminate death from life. Wouldn’t that be great?
Let’s just eliminate death. But he’s saying, but we’re not gonna be able to eliminate death, that’s out of our control, and we can’t control circumstances connected to war either. That would be nice if, you know, we were able to somehow put the war thing away for good. We can’t even control the day a person is discharged in a time of war. That’s somebody else who’s responsible for that kind of thing, and we can’t control the wickedness that’s out there either, and we can’t control tyrannical behavior.
If you notice in verse 9 there where you’ve got somebody who’s a tyrant and they are lording it over others to their own hurt. We can’t control what the Supreme Leader’s gonna do in North Korea right now. We could try to put some pressure on him and that sort of thing, but ultimately he’s gonna do whatever it is that he wants to do. See, the point here is that we need to realize that we can’t control the future. Only God can control the future.
Eli and Bethany, this couple that we brought into our home for that night and talked a little bit about their ministry in South Sudan, they were talking about, and by the way, their evacuation, the whole thing got started on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day. But they wrote a blog here recently and they said, we’re in Nairobi, Kenya, so this is before they came back to the States when they were safe after they got out of Dora, where the shootings were taking place. They said, we’re in Nairobi, Kenya, and doing well as a family. We have no idea what the future holds, but as the saying goes, we know who holds the future. We will trust in our sovereign Lord.
And there’s somebody who knows, listen, we can’t control this thing, but we believe God is in control and we’re gonna trust him. And so we’re gonna just rest and find comfort in the fact that he’s working and he has got a plan, and we’re gonna trust that plan, whatever that plan is. And I think for some of us this morning, this might be one of the most relevant parts of this passage to us today, because we’re in situations right now that we would like to see the future be different, and we would like to, you know, somehow whittle things around in such a way that it’s to our favor, but there are things that we’re just not gonna be able to do anything about. So what do we do at that point? Do we live a life of misery or do we make the most of the present and we say, well, I’m just leaving this in God’s hands.
He’s gonna have to take care of this and he is, he will take care of this and I’m just gonna rest in the fact that he’s in control. Some of you right now are watching the housing going up in terms of prices in our area. You who don’t have a home that you’ve purchased, we don’t have a home that we’ve purchased here either, and you’re seeing the housing go up and the rental prices are going up and up and up and you’re wondering, you know, what’s the future gonna be here for me? You know, is there going to be a future here for me? How long can we last here?
You know, how much longer can we live here and financially afford to be able to live here? I mean, how do you face an uncertain future like that? Well, I think we can adopt the same kind of perspective that Eli and Bethany had. In fact, it’s interesting because when they went back after the second time that they lost their home, when they went back, they relocated to an area that was near a nomadic Islamic tribe, a nomadic Islamic tribe. This was a group of people that their mission group, the mission organization they were a part of, that their mission group had been wanting to reach since 1937, but they were unable.
They were— God never opened the door. The government actually forbid the missionaries to make contact with this group. But after they lost their second home and they were forced to relocate to the Dora area, this is no kidding, there was a member of the Islamic tribe that they had hoped to reach, they came knocking on their door and asked them if they could tell them about Jesus Christ. This person Jesus, we’ve heard something about him. Can you tell us about Jesus?
I mean, it was absolutely unbelievable. And they began then to minister to these people. They began to do something that their ministry had wanted to do since 19 In fact, some of the missionaries who had been there in previous years who were not allowed to minister to that group, those missionaries got in touch with Eli and Bethany and said, what happened? How did this happen? How did you guys end up doing this?
And they just said, listen, God did it. We didn’t do it. We lost our home, had to relocate. We came back to this area and the Lord opened the door. It may be that God relocates somebody because he’s got another place that he wants to use them, and he’s going to open doors there that are a part of their future.
Then Solomon says, Ecclesiastes chapter 8, verse 10, then too I saw the wicked buried, those who used to come and go from the holy place and receive praise in the city. Where they did this. This too is meaningless. When the sentence for a crime is not quickly carried out, the hearts of the people are filled with schemes to do wrong. Although a wicked man commits 100 crimes and still lives a long time, I know that it will go better with God-fearing men who are reverent before God.
Yet because the wicked do not fear God, it will not go well with them, and their days will not lengthen like a shadow. There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked men who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless. And again, the word meaningless just simply means empty. This is just so empty.
What is wrong with this situation? And here what he’s talking about, in addition to having talked about realizing that we can’t control the king and realizing that we can’t control the future, now he’s talking about realize you can’t control the wicked. I mean, we would love to eliminate wickedness from the world, wouldn’t we? We’d like to rid the world of, verse 10, phony people that are religious, phony religious people who go to the holy place and they worship, but then they turn around and they live a wicked life, an intentionally wicked life. Yet when they die, people talk about them as if they were these godly people.
Solomon says, we’d like to eliminate that kind of hypocrisy, and we would like to eliminate when and if people, verse 11, are punished. In fact, the lack of punishment opens the door for increased future wickedness. When somebody’s not punished for their crime— think about, for instance, right now there are 8 prisoners on death row in Arkansas. I think there’s 7 now. But there are 8 prisoners there that are awaiting execution, and this whole month they’ve been discussing, and it’s been a big part of the press, of whether or not these individuals are going to be executed because the lethal injection drug is going to, at the end of the month of April here, be forbidden.
You can’t use it any longer. So they’re trying to hurry up their executions. Now whether or not that’s going to happen in the next day, I have no idea, but I do know this, that when wickedness is not punished, it opens up the possibility for increased wickedness in the future when there are no consequences for the choices people are making. That’s all Solomon is saying. If you wanna curb wickedness, you gotta curb it with some kind of consequences, and you don’t put the consequences off, you make it happen soon.
And we can’t control how long wicked people are going to live. The last part, or excuse me, the first part of verse 12 there, the last part of verse 13, that’s not in our control. And the thought that wicked people won’t be judged, that they will just go on, you know, living and then it’s gonna be all good for them at the end of this life, are you kidding? Can’t control that either. There’s a judgment that’s coming.
And this injustice matter where the righteous are getting what the wicked should get and the wicked are getting what the righteous should get, that’s just not right either. But there is a day coming that righteous people are going to get what they deserve and wicked people are going to get what they deserve. So those days are coming, but right now we can’t control the justice side of things, if people get what’s coming to them. I mean, wouldn’t it be great, this is the point, wouldn’t it be great if we could just eliminate wickedness once and for all? If we could just rid the world of terrorists?
And there would be no more terror attacks on airports and schools and workplaces and neighborhoods, and no more terrorist attacks in stores, meaning then there would be no more suffering and no more fear and no more anxiety and no more sorrow and no more pain and no more grief and no more tears.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful? That there would be no more need for executions, And there would be no more bullying. There would be no more people hurting other people. There would be no more kids taking other kids on in Facebook, demeaning their character, saying unkind things, or on Snapchat, or you name it, whatever it is. So how does all of this help us now, knowing that we can’t control the king, we can’t control the future, and we can’t control the wicked?
So how does that help us?
Well, it was a nice sermon, wouldn’t you say? Wow, what a wonderful thought. We’re not gonna be able to control the king, we’re not gonna be able to control the future, we’re not gonna be able to control the wicked. What’s he trying to get across here? I summarize it this way, 2 thoughts, 2 take-homes that we can live with and we can learn from.
Number one is I think he’s saying to us we need to surrender our need to control what we can’t. We need to surrender our need to control what we can’t. Now, this is going to be hard. Let me just say it right up front. This is going to be hard because we live with a desire to be in control.
We don’t like things to be out of control, but the fact is that in this world, there are going to be things that happen that are out of our control. Somebody came up after the first hour and said, let me tell you about the water heater that burst in our garage, and we had to end up spending the whole day in there cleaning the whole thing up. They couldn’t control that. The water heater burst. Yes, that’s a part of life.
As I was working on this message the last couple of weeks, I’m going to— next time I come to a message like this, try to narrow the work on the message to like 1 or 2 days. So that I don’t get worked over for 2 weeks. Because when you come to the scriptures, and you guys know this, there’s this principle called the teach-test principle, that when God teaches us something, he’s going to ultimately come to test us with that which it is that he taught us. Is he, he’s, is he just teaching it to us for knowledge’s sake? No, he wants to see us translate it into action in our lives.
When Jesus spent all day talking to the disciples about faith and then took them in a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee and the storm came up, what was he doing? He was testing them. It was something that was orchestrated by God himself. He was testing them to see that after the day of hearing all these stories about faith, he was testing them to see if they actually got it. Was it sinking in?
And the fact of the matter was is they had failed the test. They said to the Lord, oh Lord, if you don’t do something, we’re gonna die, and Jesus said, O you of little faith. Guys, we’ve been talking about this all day long. So this matter of control, I’ve been working on this for a couple of weeks now, and I’m telling you, it’s been fun, if you wanna say it that way, because typically what happens, you start working on something, it’s, you’re gonna be faced with whatever it is you’re working on, in this case, uncontrollable circumstances. Our battery died on our Jeep.
You know, I went out and tried to start the car and the battery’s dead right when you want to use the car. Was that out of my control? Absolutely. When we stopped on the way back from Merced in a small town at a kiosk to get some kind of dinner, we thought that it would be fast because it said fast food. This is a fast food kiosk.
And a half hour or more later when we still don’t have our food, we’re stuck there. We’ve paid for the food already. It was I didn’t wanna spend that long sitting there. It was out of our control. And when my computer people said to me, okay, listen, we’re gonna be able to fix your computer.
We’re gonna send you an overnight package. You send it right back. We’ll get this thing back to you in 3 to 5 days. But when it was 14 days and counting, and I’m not kidding, when it was 14 days and counting, I mean, you begin to realize, okay, the Lord is just teaching me something about what we’re working on here right now. About how life’s got its parts to it that are out of our control, and it could be just as simple as pulling up to a 4-way stop sign where you have stop sign cheaters, and you’re sitting there and you’re just about ready to go, but the person who pulled up 4th decides to go first, and at that moment there’s a test of how are we feeling right now toward that person, that just pulled up last and they should be waiting.
This is not right. And you become a righteousness, you know, judge there at the stop sign and your anger elevates.
So the point is, is that there are these little tests that come our way and I think they are indicators of whether or not we’re making progress in surrendering our need to control. And by the way, one of the ways we can determine whether or not we’re making progress in this area is by the enjoyment that we’re experiencing right now in a situation where it’s out of our control. Did you notice verse 15, the next verse? It says, so I commend the enjoyment of life. He’s talking about in an out-of-control world.
I commend the enjoyment of life. Because nothing is better for a man under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life that God has given him under the sun. One of the first things to go in our lives when we are in an out-of-control situation, one of the first things to go is enjoyment. Enjoyment oftentimes takes a nosedive And anger and irritation and frustration and bitterness elevates in an out-of-control situation.
And if you’ve ever spent time, you know, with somebody whose enjoyment has taken a nosedive, it’s not a lot of fun, is it? I mean, you could just be around the dinner table and they’re not bringing to the dinner table enjoyment anymore, they’re bringing the feeling of not being able to get control, and that’s frustrated them. And so it makes for a lousy dinner with these individuals. You may have experienced this with some friends, or— I mean, we experienced this a couple weeks ago. I mentioned the zoo.
We experienced this actually when we took the kids to the zoo. We had a great time, these 5 grandchildren from 8 years old on down to 2. We had a great time with them. It was a lot of fun until we were walking out of the zoo and the zoo people have strategically positioned on your walk out right next to the gate a souvenir shop. Have you noticed this?
Strategically positioned with stuffed animals outside the souvenir shop. And of course at that moment our grandkids are absolutely sure that God wants us to buy them the stuffed animals, you know, the turtle, the giraffe, the snake, all of that. And so we have this interesting encounter at that point in time that basically is a struggle over whether or not our grandchildren are going to be able to control our credit card right now, you know? So they had a meltdown, and the meltdown continued into the car, and it continued on the ride home. We were in Fresno, so we’re going back to Merced.
So it continued for the next 45 to 60 minutes on the ride back home. It was an entirely different ride back home than the ride that we had there. The ride that we had there was filled with joy and filled with anticipation, and we’re gonna go to the zoo together, and this is going to be a great time. Camden, our oldest who is in the car there, 8 years old, he says to me, hey, Grandpa, what is aerodynamics mean? What’s aerodynamics?
And I thought, you gotta be kidding. What are you asking me that question for? But anyway, do you know who I am? And so, I mean, if he knew, he wouldn’t be asking me. But so he asked me the question and I said, well, it has to do with, you know, wind.
Is that enough? No, what more? So it was like, Well, glide and drag, and so I started talking about anything that would come to my mind, and then I noticed across the freeway an aerodynamic truck. You know what I’m talking about, where these trucks have these air deflectors, you know what I mean? Where on— some of you don’t know, you’re looking at me like, I have no idea what you’re talking about, Dave.
Where if you look at certain trucks, you’ll see that behind the cab is this air deflector that’s gonna push the air up over the trailer so that it makes the truck aerodynamic. Trust me on this, okay? You can Google it, you’ll figure it out later. And so I started pointing out these different trucks and I said, you see that truck over there is aerodynamic and that truck over there is not aerodynamic. That one is, that has wind drag on it because there was no air deflector.
It’s just gonna crash into the trailer and potentially change the gas mileage on the truck. So we had a very fun, enjoyable conversation with a guy that, I don’t know, maybe he’ll be like most of you, an engineer someday? I mean, why do you ask questions like that at 8 years of age? So we’re having fun talking about aerodynamics, it’s great. You know what we spent time talking about on the way home?
We spent the entire trip on the way home talking about entitlement and appreciation. Entitlement and appreciation. Well, we gotta have the stuffed animals. Well, wait, wait, wait, wait, let’s go over this, okay? This is just not fair.
I— let’s talk about this. We first of all brought you guys to the zoo, and then we paid your way into the zoo, and then we bought you some nice refreshments, and we bought the lunch that you wanted for you, and then we bought these souvenir cups for you that you get to take home and remind you of the zoo. Let’s talk about entitlement and appreciation right now. It was an entirely different ride on the way home. Enjoyment took a dive.
And what Solomon is saying is that there are circumstances in our lives that we flat out are not going to be able to control. We’ve got to accept that fact and embrace that fact, even to the degree that enjoyment doesn’t take a dive. The other point here is we need to embrace our need to control what we can. We need to embrace our need to control what we can. You say, what’s that?
Well, it’s our response to that which we can’t control. It may be a response to a person. It may be a response to a circumstance. It’s our response. So if we go back here in the text, It’s your response to the King.
Do you show respect to the King? Do you, like, run out of the King’s presence? Do you question the King’s work? It’s your response to the King. It’s your response to the future.
It’s your response to this world of wickedness. It’s your viewpoint. It’s how you’re handling these things. See, we have the opportunity when things are out of our control to choose our response. In fact, even choose how much enjoyment we’re gonna have right now.
So yesterday this played out. We had man day and the group that I was in went out golfing. And whenever I go golfing, that means that most of my shots are not gonna be under control. You don’t wanna be on the golf course anywhere near me when I’m golfing out there. So I can’t control my shots, but I can control my response.
That’s what Solomon’s going after here. You’re not gonna be able to control a lot of things that happen in this life, but you can control your response, and your response can make all the difference between whether or not you’re enjoying life right now or not. Now let me tell you the secret. The secret here is not to try to do this alone, not to try to deal with this out-of-control world alone. The secret here is to connect with God through Jesus Christ, to receive the gift of life that Christ gives, and when that happens, you receive the Holy Spirit, and the fruit of the Holy Spirit is several things, But it’s joy.
The fruit of the Holy Spirit is joy, and the fruit of the Holy Spirit is self-control in an out-of-control world. So where is enjoyment found? It’s not found in making the circumstances exactly like you want them to be. I mean, if there’s something you can do, great. If there’s some way for you to have an impact on wickedness in a positive way to deter it, great.
But you may not be able to do anything.
But you can do something. You can control your response to the circumstance that is out of control.
Well, let’s ask the Lord to help us take that message this week and apply it. Father, thanks for this help this morning that’s found here in this passage that speaks to a matter that’s so much a part of our lives. I pray that you would help us be able to face circumstances from your perspective so that when we can’t control something, there is always something that can be controlled And that is our response to that circumstance. But Lord, for us to try to do that without you is doomed to failure. So I pray that you would help us connect with you in a very personal, ongoing way that changes our lives and changes our responses and changes our levels of enjoyment.
And however that works itself out in each life here this morning, we pray for your personal work to show us what it is that you want. But may we, Lord, live in this world in a way that represents the desires that you have for our life. And when we fail, then may we come back again to your grace and start again and move on down that road to becoming the people that you desire us to be. Thank you for this wonderful passage this morning that reminds us that we’re not gonna be able to control life, but we can control the people that we’re becoming in this life and the people that you want us to be. And as we surrender to your work, a great work is done.
And so we ask for that in Jesus’ name, amen.
