Ecclesiastes 2-3

Published on Sep 19, 2012

Calvary Chapel Spring Valley | Sunday Evening | September 16, 2012 | Derek Neider

_____________________________

I have written on the Book of Ecclesiastes and the subject of the meaning of our lives on several occasions on this blog. In this series on Ecclesiastes I hope to show how secular humanist man can not hope to find a lasting meaning to his life in a closed system without bringing God back into the picture. This is the same exact case with Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes. Three thousand years ago, Solomon took a look at life “under the sun” in his book of Ecclesiastes. Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term ‘under the sun.’ What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system, and you are left with only this world of time plus chance plus matter.”

Let me show you some inescapable conclusions if you choose to live without God in the picture. Solomon came to these same conclusions when he looked at life “under the sun.”

1. Death is the great equalizer (Eccl 3:20, “All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.”)
2. Chance and time have determined the past, and they will determine the future.  (Ecclesiastes 9:11-13)
3. Power reigns in this life, and the scales are not balanced(Eccl 4:1)
4. Nothing in life gives true satisfaction without God including knowledge (1:16-18), ladies and liquor (2:1-3, 8, 10, 11), and great building projects (2:4-6, 18-20).

You can only find a lasting meaning to your life by looking above the sun and bring God back into the picture.

(Ed Young is senior pastor of one of America’s largest and fastest-growing congregations, the Second Baptist Church of Houston, Texas. Located on a large, contemporary campus in suburban Houston — featured in a full-page illustration in USA Today — the church offers a model of reaching and involving young and median adults. Young is seen weekly on a nationally-televised program featuring the worship service at Second Baptist.)

Preaching: Your newest book — Been There, Done That, Now What? — deals with the increasing sense of life’s meaninglessness and the lack of value of life that seems so prevalent in American culture today. As you minister to your own congregation, do you find that to be a common attitude, particularly with baby boomers?Young: Absolutely. With boomers and busters. I think that in different ways everyone is looking for meaning and they try many different channels. In reading the book of Ecclesiastes, I realized this was Solomon also: been there, done that, now what? Solomon wrote three books in the Bible: Song of Solomon — a romantic book, it’s filled with chemistry and love and great words that sizzle of his first love. Then he wrote Proverbs — a middle-aged man, successful. Been there, done that.Then he reveals his inner heart and soul — perhaps his journal or his spiritual autobiography — and that’s the book of Ecclesiastes. The end result is that he looks back and says, “I have lived a life under the sun.” It was a life of emptiness, a life void of meaning. Solomon — who was the wealthiest person who ever lived and evidently one of the most brilliant individuals who has ever lived — gets to the end of his life, after he’s accomplished all that he’d accomplished, and he says it’s all empty, it’s all futility, it’s all vanity. And he says, “Now what, now what? What’s it all about, what did it mean?” He missed the meaning of life.Preaching: Why do people feel that way today?Young: I think they’re trying the same thing Solomon did. Many people are pursuing pleasure; they’re hedonists. A lot of people are pursuing materialism; they’re pursuing wealth. Someone just told me that one who is wealthy has one and only one advantage over those of us who are not wealthy. I asked, “What is it?” He replied, “They know wealth will not bring happiness.” I think people are trying the same things. There’s nothing new under the sun and Solomon lived an under-the-sun lifestyle. In doing so, he cut off the tie with God that he had early in his life.No one else in history that I know of was told by God, “Name it and you can have it” — was given a blank check. Solomon asked for wisdom and God was so pleased that He gave him wisdom and honor and wealth. That’s the way God does, you know. When God’s pleased He gives us more than we ask for. But somewhere along the way with building the temple, Solomon — who I believe went through all the rituals of worship and all the paths of being a religious man, a God-fearing man — somewhere along the way he sold out to this world’s structure and this world’s system. We’ve seen that sell-out happen in America in our own lifetime…Preaching: How do you prepare for that moment in the pulpit after you’ve written the manuscript?

Young: I used to practice some, though I rarely do that anymore; sometimes I will go over something. I get my outline and then I work on the transitional phrases. I spend a long time on the introduction and I spend a good while on the conclusion, then I begin to fill in the gaps. I’m now on Compuserve (a computer service), which is a wonderful help. I can find so many periodicals, modern speeches or press conferences, TV or radio programs which commented on any one particular area I’m dealing with. I’m wired into various libraries from which I can get bibliographical information or a thesis that was written. This has been a recent thing for me, and it’s opened up just a whole new world of information. The key to the process is discernment, plus taking all that information and saying it in a simple way.For example, I think preaching needs to be void of much of the old religious terminology in order to meet those busters and those boomers. Instead of talking about salvation, I might use the word salvaged. When you salvage something, you restore it for the purpose for which it was made — that’s what salvaging is. That’s also what salvation is. The boomer understands that. We have geared the pulpit in our church to those who are not yet there. We feed and minister to our flock through Bible study and through other kinds of worship experiences, but primarily we have pitched the ministry of our church to the secular mind.Therefore, Ecclesiastes is right over the plate. We’ve had more adults come to Christ — more people who’ve come from being agnostics and atheists — just because of the book of Ecclesiastes. It asks the question that the rest of the Bible answers. If you’re going to teach the Bible, begin with Ecclesiastes.I worked all last summer just on titles before I began in September. Then I worked on my outlines. I had my bibliography. I got people who had really struggled with Ecclesiastes ahead of me, which has always been helpful. Then I sit down with the Scriptures. First of all, I try to do my own work: “What does this scripture say to me? Are there any pregnant words there?” Find those pregnant words and do a little word-study. Then I try to let the Scripture outline itself if that’s possible. God works in creative ways and different ways in preaching.My process of preparation: I get my sermon, my title, a sense of God’s direction, then I write out manuscripts of that sermon and I preach without notes. I can just have an open Bible because I’ve crafted that through writing. I dictate it before I preach. My sermon’s typed before I preach, it’s typed after I preach, so I’ve got double manuscripts for anything that I’ve done. It helps us to edit for television as well. I’ll spend twenty hours a week on every sermon.

Related posts:

Adam’s song is filled with hope in the last paragraph of lyrics. So many young people stop short of committing suicide and they think more of the hope the future can offer. Take a look at the story below of someone who gave life another chance after he had actually shot himself in a failed suicide attempt.

Spend It Any Way You Like

Jim Centifanto parked his motorcycle and walked into the Florida woods. He loaded the 12-gauge shotgun he had borrowed and took a deep breath. Holding the shotgun’s barrel in his left hand, he pressed its muzzle into his stomach. Leaning forward, he pulled the trigger with his right hand.

The blast threw him off his feet and left a gaping, fist-sized hole on the left side of his abdomen. Dropping the gun, Jim staggered back to his motorcycle, rode to his mother’s house four miles away, and passed out on her front steps.

Four days later, as he was waking up from a coma, he heard a voice speak to him. “I saved you for a reason,” the voice said. Centifanto looked around, startled. The room was empty.

Centifanto’s father had taught him and his brothers and sisters to respond to problems with violence. Lawrence Centifanto, a career Marine, married his wife, Ysolina, while he was serving in Panama. Soon after Jim was born, his father went to Korea for three years, then to Vietnam for another three years. Centifanto was 6 before he knew his father.

Lawrence Centifanto sent all his money home for the six long years he was at war. He asked his wife to save it up for him, and expected to return home to a sizable nest egg. Instead, she moved her family from New York to Florida and put herself through medical school.

“I’m not sure if he loved my mother,” Jim said, “but I know she didn’t love him. She only married him to get her American citizenship and an education.”

Centifanto’s excitement at meeting his father quickly turned into horror when his father discovered what had happened to his money. He made his children sit on the sofa and watch as he beat and choked their mother.

Living with his father, Centifanto said, was like living with an unpredictable volcano. Lawrence Centifanto viciously beat his wife and children at the slightest provocation or for no reason at all. One time, he tore an earring out of his daughter’s ear. Another time, after being out of town for a month, he pulled up in his driveway and saw Jim pull aside the curtains to look out the front window, excited to see his father. Lawrence responded to his son’s enthusiastic greeting with a savage beating. “He told me I could have gotten dirt on the curtains,” Centifanto said.

Finally, when Centifanto was 9, his mother divorced her husband. Ysolina Centifanto’s solution to her ex-husband’s brutal discipline was to avoid disciplining her children at all. “We went from one end of the scale to the other. She said, ‘This will never happen to us again,’ and she let my brothers and I run totally wild. We did anything we wanted.”

Within a year, Centifanto was expelled from the Catholic school he had been attending and joined a gang with his brother. He began using and dealing drugs.

One day the vice president of Centifanto’s gang, Bobby Hicks, showed up at the gang’s hangout with a short haircut and wearing a suit and tie. “We thought he was going to court,” Centifanto said. “You know, when you have to see a judge you dress up nice and hope maybe he’ll be more lenient. That’s what we thought Bobby was doing.”

Instead, Hicks threw his fellow gang members a curve. “I just got born again!” he announced.

“He could have said, ‘I just went to the moon,’ for as much as we understood him,” Centifanto said. “We just laughed and said, ‘You did what?'”

But when Hicks started preaching at his friends, the gang’s leader stopped laughing and provoked Centifanto to fight Hicks.

“Bobby was 20 — six years older than me,” Centifanto said, “and he weighed about 250 pounds. I’d seen what he did to other guys. I whipped him with a bullwhip and chased him down the street; I totally humiliated him in front of everyone. The day before, he would have killed me. But this time, he wouldn’t fight. I didn’t know what made him act so weird.”

Centifanto soon forgot his former friend’s odd behavior as he sank deeper into his world of drinking and drugs. “I stayed stoned all the time, 24 hours a day,” he said. “I’d take enough drugs at night to keep me stoned until I woke up, then start over again.”

In 1970, when Centifanto was 15, his girlfriend broke up with him. “She was the closest thing to love I had in my life,” he said. “I hated life, just hated it. No one loved me and when she rejected me, too, I couldn’t take it.” He borrowed a shotgun and shot himself in the stomach. Incredibly, he lived.

“I was in a coma for four days,” Centifanto said. “No one expected me to live; they couldn’t believe I’d even managed to ride my bike to my mother’s house.”

Soon after Centifanto awoke from his coma, his mother announced she had had it with him and sent him to live with his father in Chicago. Within a year, his stepmother kicked him out, too. He was 17.

Centifanto got a job at a steel mill and lived with Terry, a co-worker, and his parents. Terry and his father worked at the steel mill with Centifanto. After work, the three of them got drunk almost every night. Then Terry’s mother surprised them all one day: She announced that she had become a Christian.

“She used to try to talk with me about Christ for hours,” Centifanto said, “even though I was usually drunk. I accidentally walked in on her one night and she was praying, just weeping and asking God to have mercy on me. Everyone else had rejected me, and she didn’t have any benefit from trying to reach me. But here she was praying for me. I just couldn’t understand it.”

About two months later, Centifanto joined the Marines, and found he made a good soldier. “I went in there full of bitterness and violence, and they said, ‘Here’s a gun. We like it if you want to hate and kill.'” But peace of mind still eluded him. His drinking continued unabated, landing him in the hospital twice and almost destroying his kidneys.

Two years later, Centifanto was stationed in Hawaii. One night while his platoon was on maneuvers, a soldier from another unit struck up a conversation with him.

“He told me about what Jesus had done for him,” Centifanto said, “and I just started weeping uncontrollably. I could see he’d been where I was and I wanted what he had.” Centifanto asked the man if he could go to church with him, and the man agreed to pick Centifanto up at his barracks the next Sunday morning.

But Centifanto had neglected to get his name, and when he didn’t show up, Centifanto was desperate. Finally, about two months later, Centifanto ran into him again. “I shook him and yelled at him: ‘You said you’d take me to church! You better show up this time!'” Centifanto said with a chuckle. He got the man’s name — Donald Taylor — and eagerly awaited the next Sunday.

Taylor showed up as promised this time, and took Centifanto to church. “I was mad at Don because I thought he told Eugene Stober, the pastor, about me,” Centifanto said. “Every single word that came out of his mouth was about me and my sin.

“When I was 14 and Bobby Hicks got saved, I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I heard God speak to me after I shot myself, but I didn’t listen to that, either. And Terry’s mom explained the gospel to me, but it still didn’t stop me from sinning.

“We have to come to the end of ourselves before we realize how desperately we are in need. I was at the end of myself this time. I was so ripe for the gospel. This time it was different; this time the ring of truth was going through my heart.”

Centifanto began attending church with Taylor. A month later, while supervising the armory guard, he read a magazine article about the end of the world and panicked. “I was convinced Jesus was coming back — tomorrow!” he said. He left his post — a court-martial offense — and hurried to the church. Finding Pastor Stober, he begged him to tell him how to get saved.

Eugene Stober led Centifanto in prayer. That night, Aug. 17, 1974, in Oahu, Hawaii, when he was 19 years old, Jim Centifanto asked Jesus Christ to forgive his sin and be his Lord and Savior.

When they were finished praying, Pastor Stober handed Centifanto a quarter. Confused, he took it. “That’s what salvation is like: a free gift,” Stober said. “And that quarter is just like your life, too: You’re free to spend it any way you like, but you can only spend it once.”

“That’s when what had just happened really hit me,” Centifanto said. “It was like scales fell from my eyes. All the hate and bitterness, the way I hated myself and everyone else and hated life so much — it left me; it was all gone, just like that.”

Centifanto returned to the base, expecting to face a court-martial. To his surprise, his commander said, “Well, don’t let it happen again,” and dismissed him. When he awoke the next morning, he received another surprise: His desire for drugs and alcohol was gone, never to return.

Today Jim Centifanto and his wife and four children are missionaries in Guatemala. “The minute I got saved I started witnessing to everything that moved,” he said. “I could never see any way to live after that but in service to God. When Pastor Stober handed me that quarter, God changed my life forever. He really did change my heart and make me a new creation.”