Ecclesiastes 3:1-11

Ecclesiastes chapter 3:1, Qoheleth says to us, “There's an appointed time for

everything, and there is a time for every event under heaven:

a time to give birth and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot what is planted,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build up,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to throw stones and a time to gather stones,

a time to embrace and a time to shun embracing,

a time to search and a time to give up as lost,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear apart and a time to sew together,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.”

(9) “What profit is there to the worker from that in which he toils? I've seen the task which God has given the sons of men, with which He is to which to occupy themselves. He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their hearts. Yet so as man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end.”

Father, we don't know what You're up to at this moment, but we know who You are, and we pray that You would guide us as we think about this passage together, as we think about our lives together, we think about the seasons of our lives and we think about what we should be up to in these seasons of our lives. Please guide us. Please make it clear to us what You have for each one of us individually today. Thank you so much for your book and thank you so much

for a chance to think about it. We pray in Christ's name, Amen.

Listen! Part of gaining wisdom is the process of observing, reflection and concluding

Qoheleth is practicing today a very classic wisdom accusation process, which is observe, reflect, conclude, look at something, think about it, and conclude something about it.

Probably the most famous passage in the Bible for that is Proverbs 24:30-34. Here's the writer of the Proverbs saying, here's what I observed. “I passed by the field of the sluggard. by the vineyard of a man lacking sense, and behold, it was completely overgrown with thistles. Its surface was covered with nettles, and its stonewall was broken down. I was walking down the road and this is what I saw. Now here's his reflection, verse (32) Then I saw, I reflected upon it. I looked and I received instruction.” I learned something by looking at a guy's broken down garden. Here's what.”I learned here, his conclusion “A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest then your poverty will come as a robber, and your want to be like an armed man.“

In summary, sooner than later a lazy person will lack what they need, and

the writer proverbs figured that out by walking by a broken down vineyard.

Today, Qoheleth is going to invite us to do the same thing. To look at stuff, to reflect on what we see and make some conclusions. A few years ago I was at the Moody Bible Institute, Pastors Conference. It was the second or third day of the conference. I'm standing in line to speak to the people at the desk about some logistic thing. And the guy ahead of me was a very famous pastor. If I said his name, you would know his name. I'm not going to say his name. If

you come see me privately, I'm not going to say his name. So, he's a person, you know, if I said his name and when he got to the front, it was his turn at the desk. He was very angry and very upset with the girl working the desk and said why have you put me in this horrible hotel? The room is small, it's too far to drive. It's up on the 12th floor and he's just upset. I was in the same hotel. I was on the same floor. It was a fine hotel. I looked at what he did, I thought about what he did, and I concluded he lost touch with who he is as a servant of Christ. He believed in his own presence too much. He had forgotten that the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head, and Moody rented him a warm, safe, comfortable room.

I looked at it, I thought about it, I concluded about it. Moody hadn't made a mistake. This was a comment not on Moody, it was a comment on him. We need to look at life and reflect on it and say what do I, what do I learn here about what is exactly going on? It's not enough to just walk away and say that was weird. I have to think about it.

Qoheleth Reflected:

So Qoheleth today is going to observe 14 different sets of couplets versus 2 to 8. That's 28 items. We're not going to talk about them all. Be a 28 item and a 28 point message and we would all be dead, including myself.

But he's mentioning the far ends of 14 different spectrums. There's a time to be born and a time to die, and it's a figure of speech called a merism. It means I mentioned both ends of a spectrum, not to stand just for the ends, but to stand for the whole spectrum. So we use the same thing. We say I look for my keys high and low. I don't mean I looked on the ceiling and on the floor, I mean I looked everywhere. To try to figure out where my keys were. And Qoheleth says there's a time to be born, a time to die, and a time for every last thing in between as well. And he's going to help us think through some of these conclusions. Based on that, he's going to conclude a whole bunch of his stuff. But he's saying to us, I think you need to pay severe attention to life. So verse one, here's a general conclusion. There's an appointed time for everything and there's a time. For every event under heaven.

There's a general time for everything and you need to know generally what time it is. A few years ago we had our church do an advent candle. So every week a family would come up on stage. They would read a scripture, light the candle and go sit down. One particular Sunday this family comes up, Father, mother, 3 teenage daughters. The girls lit the candle, the parents were reading the passage and the girls got to giggling. And they couldn't stop. And the more they tried, the worse it got. And they were embarrassed and they were losing it. And their parents are shooting them death daggers right on the stage. And everybody in the audience is just uneasy. And there's a time to giggle. But that wasn't it. We need to understand the times in our life.

Qoheleth Concluded:

He gives these specific observations, chapters verses 2-8. We're going to look at some conclusions, but not everyone of those, here's what he reflected on, he says. What prophet is there for the worker from that in which he toils?

What is leftover after you work? 60-70, Eighty years? What? What's what? What do you have leftover? What can you say? OK, there was something accomplished here. This is really the ultimate sucker punch of life, he says. You're born, you live 70 years, you work and you strive. You die and there's nothing left over. What was gained? What was the profit? What's the benefit?

I've done a lot of funerals in my life, but two of them stand out to me. A lot of them stand out, but two of them for this reason. They were funerals for people who were men in their 70s or 80s. They were wealthy, accomplished people.

They had worked very hard. Classic bootstrap stories. Started with nothing, ended up with a big company, big empire, big money, big house, big truck.

They had it all. And then they died. One of them died after a long slow illness and one of them died very unexpectedly in a 20 mile an hour accident where he didn't have a seat belt on and he rolled his truck. So they're gone. They're not followers of Jesus. We do the funeral, they do an open mic. During the

funeral, people stand up. And at the first one they stood up. And almost every person who came to the open mic said whenever I would go to his house, he would say, let's have a rum and coke, rum and coke, rum and coke, rum. And like 10 people come to the open mic, rum and coke. How would you like

to have on your tombstone? Let's have a rum and coke.

There's nothing leftover from that. The other guy was famous for $100 tips.

Person after person came up, he gave me a $100 tip. It was so great at his tombstone, you know, so many years I lived on the $100 tip. There's not much leftover friends. That's the sucker punch of life. You've gone through all of this and then that's all you've got.

Verse 10, he says, I've seen the task which God has given the sons of men with which to occupy themselves. Here's the ongoing sucker punch of life. You've got this task that you need to do. And it's grievous the whole way.

And you get to the end of it and you die. It's a struggle, it's a fight. And so he makes some conclusions for us and he begins in verse 11 by saying.

God has made everything appropriate in His time. The sovereign hand of God is on everything in the world, every nation, all of history. The sovereign hand of God is on me and I have appropriate seasons in my life. And what is appropriate for my time of life right now and your time of life?

Well, generally speaking, what's appropriate is love God. Love others, and share Christ. Make disciples, serve others, be forgiving, be gracious, be truthful. I mean, there's some general things. It's always that time. It's always that time to be that person. But then there's specific times. What time is it in your life right now? Do you know what time it is? Let me give you some possible options. There's a billion others. Time to get a haircut. No, not time for me. Time to retire. Get a job. Abandoned cynicism. Get into counseling.

Take a week off, eat better, get the oil change, move into a care home, go back

to school.

Do something stark and definitive about a problem you've tried to ignore for years. Call your estranged sister, forgive your boss, come clean with an addiction. Step up to ministry at FCBC, get out of your comfort zone and go to Cuba with me in February. Stop lying to yourself about whatever. Start doing your homework, clean your room, clean your study. What time?

In your life, when you understand your season, you know what time it is. You know what you should do. Now here's the problem for us, friends.

If I am complaining about this time or season in my life, I am complaining about my life and I am complaining against the God who gave me this life. This is my day, this is my one day. This day makes up my life. It's my whole life this day.

Yesterday's gone, tomorrow's unsure, but this day I have this whole life in front of me. And so I need to be a person who is loving God today in my life. Because if I complain about today, I'm complaining about the God who gave me today.

I once did a nine part sermon series on the deadliness of the Christian life. The Christian life is intensely daily. It's today. Give us this day, Our Daily Bread. This is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. Come now, you who say tomorrow will go to such and such a city and make a profit. You have no idea what's coming tomorrow. Today is the acceptable day of salvation. Exhort one another today while it's still called today. It just goes on and on. The big issue is how is Dave Gibson living in today and how are you living in today? Are we people who are connected with today? You might be saying, listen, today's a difficult day, Dave, for whatever reason, here's a

quiz for you.

What is God's track record on getting you personally through difficult days? 100% I think because you're not dead, you're here. I've had some miserable days of my life. Some days I would hate to live over. God faithfully took me every last through every last one of them. His track record on helping you through miserable days is 100%. He's batting 1000 on all of it. And so we need to say, OK, I'm going to trust him for today no matter how difficult or tomorrow no matter how difficult it seems verse 11. God has sent. Set eternity in the hearts of men we live in today. But there is in our hearts this basic, basic core belief that there's more than time and space. There's something else. We know it for a fact. The ancient cartographers would draw a map of what had been explored and then they would draw a line where they hadn't explored, where they didn't know what was over there. And they would write this Latin phrase non plus ultra. (No more beyond)  Or they would write Terra Incognito, (unknown land). But for us as Christians, and truthfully, for every believer,  (for every human being).

Qoheleth says it really should say plus ultra. There's more than time and space. There's more than living here in our hearts. We know there is plus ultra. There is more beyond. Even an atheist who screams. When we die, we cease to exist and we are unconscious and it's over. Even they know, according

to verse 11, that in their heart, no, there's plus ultra, there's something else out there.

We can conclude:

And so an important subset of that truth is one of the things out there beyond death is judgment. God's going to deal with everything. It's going to deal with the fishing line that I stole in second grade. From a sporting goods store, just because my buddies dared me to do it. He's going to do deal with the rapes, the beatings, the lies. He's going to deal with Pol Pot, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler. He's going to deal with all of it. He's the one who has the ability to do it. He's the one who's going to deal with it! Deal with it from the smallest to the largest. And therefore, because I know there's more than this life. And because I know that part of this life, part of the next life, is judgment.

I need to do something ahead of time to be ready to stand before God in that judgment. I was sharing the gospel with a man years ago and he said to me, Dave, I don't believe in God. But after I die, if it turns out he's real, then I will believe in him.

Well, it's a little late, a little late. So before we get to that point, we've got to respond to this basic message. Bad news. I have a sin problem. I've done a whole lot worse than steel fishing line. I've got a lot of things on my record that I'd not like to explain to God. Further bad news, it's my sin that separates me from a holy God. He has to deal with my sin. He stops being holy. There's this massive Canyon between us. We can't get across it. This happened before some of you were born, but Evel Knievel, the famous motorcycle guy from Butte, Mt., built a rocket to jump the Snake River Canyon down by Twin Falls. Big old publicity stunt. The TV was there. He gets on his rocket, shoots it off. The rocket fails. It goes down in the Canyon. The chute deploys. Almost killed him. He couldn't get across the Snake River Canyon even with a rocket.

We can't get across the gulf between the US and God by ourselves. It's too much. So the good news is Jesus did something, He paid for it on the cross as a substitute. It was supposed to be me. It was supposed to be you, but he went up there instead. The further good news is I can put my trust in Christ and be forgiven. Make a simple decision. I stopped trusting and being a

good person. Never did anything worse than steal a fishing line. I'm better than my neighbor, I go to church, whatever. I stop trusting and all that stuff and I just say no. I have one hope and my hope is in Jesus himself.

Eternity does not have do overs. This life matters. This life matters. The choices we make. Verse 11 he says man will not find out the work which God has done from the beginning even to the end. Man will not know God is eternal.

It's not Sunday morning for God, it's now for God. God lives in the eternal now.

He's not waiting for money to get here. He lives forever. He's completely trustable. He's up to the task of running the universe.

The elders at FCBC hired me as an interim pastor. They didn't hire my 17 year old grandson because he wasn't up to it. God didn't hire me to run the

universe because I'm not up to it. I don't have the wisdom, the power. I wouldn't know what to do. I got an e-mail from God about, I don't know, just after e-mail got invented, I got an e-mail from him, he said, dear Dave, thanks for your offer to run the universe. I've got it. Really. Thanks anyway, love you God. If you didn't get that e-mail, it's probably in your spam folder. You should go take a look because God is the one who's up to running the universe and our one good option is to trust him. Our one good option is to say.

Listen, God is up to something. God is good, therefore he's up to something good. Therefore, he's trustable, and therefore I need to stop fretting about the entire universe because I know that he's up to something good in my life, in your life, in our collective life, God's up to something good. We need to trust him for that, and he's very, very trustworthy. Now I want to just share a few conclusions. They're all in your outline. I'm not going to talk about all of them, but being an obsessive person, I had to put them all in there and we'll just

skip some of them. But there are some conclusions that we can make, I think.

From this issue of these 14 couplets, our lives have a time for everything.

But we do not personally schedule them all right. If I'm getting my teeth cleaned, I schedule it for when I can be at the dentist. I can do that. But our lives are full of so much stuff that we cannot schedule. I can't schedule a person dying. I can't schedule a person getting mad. I can't schedule that my

own health is getting bad. I can't say, oh, this would be a bad time to get sick, so I'm not getting sick. I mean, it's not up to me. I don't schedule any of that stuff.

I just deal with what comes to me, same as you do, we just deal with what comes to us. Secondly, our lives have seasons and we can recognize the season. We can accept the season and we can live in the season.

What walks on 4 legs in the morning, 2 legs at noon and three legs in the evening? Man - us. I crawled first and I'm still on two legs now and at some point I'll be on a cane or even a Walker and I just need to know what, what season am I in? What season am I in in my life right now?

There's no one size of all fits approach to that number three, our lives have both wonderful seasons and horrible seasons. We can, we can accept it, we can expect it, but we can't change it. There's some wonderful seasons where my health's good, my money's good, my relationships are good, everything's happy at church.

Wonderful seasons. There's some horrible seasons where my kids are at each other's throats, or my money's bad or my car broke down or somebody hates me or I'm getting sued by my neighbor. There's some horrible seasons.

And then there's some mixed seasons where my health is doing horrible and my granddaughter marries a wonderful Christian man.

I can't schedule it, I can't change it. I just have to deal with all those things as they come to me. Our lives have very painful flaws and a great deal of pain.

We live in what is called East of Eden, so when Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden, they were apparently kicked out to the east because God stationed an Angel with a flaming sword that just kept circling around and it

prevented them from going back in the garden.

And eating of the tree of life and living forever in their fallen body. The Angel could keep them away from the tree of life. But the problem is the Angel can't keep us away from evil choices. We can still choose evil stuff. When I trust Christ, I get a new nature, but I retain my old nature until I see Christ. The best word to substitute for nature is the word capacity. I have a new capacity to obey God, empowered by the Holy Spirit, but I still have my old capacity to live in the flesh and disobey God. I can do either one of those. I have that capacity, and I have a long history of sinful choices in my life.

I still live east of Eden, but God helps me even though I live east of Eden. I'm not in the Garden of Eden anymore. Our lives have strange dualities that we cannot avoid, that we just have to accept. Twice in my life I have done a funeral on Saturday morning and a wedding on Saturday afternoon. You go to the funeral in your suit. Sadness, difficult struggle, a lot of crying, a lot of hugging, you know, really a massive struggle and you get in your car and you drive to a wedding.

Didn't have to change my suit. I had to change my mindset. I had to change my heart set because you're doing two different starkly different things in a single day. I didn't schedule it. I just have to just have to deal with it. Or he says our lives are confined by time, but we also know that we are eternal. There is more beyond this. We already talked about that our lives are hard wired with the truth of eternity. We can get ready for that. We already discussed that.

Our lives have general guidance principles from the Bible, but they don't have a step by step detailed outline. Here's exactly what to do. To keep your life together.

My boy and his boy built a Saturn V rocket out of Legos last Christmas and it's sitting right there. They built it, they put it on my desk. I didn't want to haul it home and spend it on my desk ever since. This rocket has 19,169 pieces in it because that's the first year it shut off. Most powerful rocket ever made in human history. Took our folks to the moon decades ago and this rocket with 19,169 pieces. Has a 284 page instruction manual, top of page one, there's a picture with the first two pieces you put together, and it just goes that way for 282 pages. And if you didn't have that manual, you can't put that together.

Well, friends, we didn't get that manual with life and we got this book, which has beautiful principles in it, wonderful guidance, full of truth. We got the lives of people who've honored God in this book, Jesus and Nehemiah and Paul and Moses. We can look at their lives. We have a whole bunch of things, but we don't have specifics. Like there's nothing in this Bible where you can turn to

and say, OK, chapter 4, verse 9. Here's what you need to know about.

Chen Transgenderism.

Now there's a bunch of principles that apply to it, but it's not discussed directly. There's a lot not discussed directly. There is no place in the Bible to

turn to say what do I do when my 16 year old child runs away? What do I do

when my neighbor sues me? What do I do when I realize I'm losing my memory? There's no place to turn and say to yourself, well, what do I do when my candidate loses or won? What do I do when my pastor quits? What do I do when my friends leave the church? It's not a detailed diagram of 282 pages.

We used to work from the general manual and say I'm going to honor Christ from these principles even though it does not address. What to do when my pastor quits? I can still honor Christ even though that is not specifically discussed. Our lives are profoundly relational. In every season of life and in my season of life and yours, we are relating to people in different seasons.

The key thing to understand about us is that we are relational at the core. We relate to God, we relate to family, we relate to the church, we relate to the neighbor, we relate to the random person we run into at the gas station. It's always related. If you have a little girl who's born, she's an infant, and then she becomes a toddler, and then a child, and then a teenager, and then a girlfriend, and then a fiance, and then a wife, and then a mother and then a grandmother, and then she moves into a care home with a bunch of other great grandmothers. That woman in every stage of life was in relationship with

somebody. You can't be an infant without having a mother. You can't be a wife without having a husband. You can't be a mother without having a child. A grandmother will have a grandchild. It's always about relationships.

And so the question is, in my personal stage of life, how am I doing on relationships? How am I doing in relationships when I get done as interim pastor? The elders are not going to say, OK, did Dave increase the attendance? Did great, Dave increase the money? Did David get more parking lot paved?

That's not the question.

The question is, did he deal with every last person with grace and truth?

That's the question. How was he relating to the people of God and the people who haven't yet trusted God? The massive issue for our lives, How are we doing in a relationship? I think the key indicator of maturity is becoming a more and more loving person because Jesus is at the core a loving person for God. So the world that he gave his only begotten Son, he sacrificed for the good of others.

Am I making any sacrifices for the good of other people around me? The big question for Dave Gibson is not if we had more money or more people, was he a person of grace.

Friends, if I get to the end of my life, I'm 94 years old, I still live in my house and everybody in the neighborhood knows me as grouchy old Man Gibson.

That's a failure. That's a major fail. I'm in relationships every season with other people in some season of life. Here's the big idea. The core element of skillful living in our lives is that we learn to tell time. I don't mean Mickey's big hands on the two and his little hands on the four. We learned to tell what time it is in my life. What time is it my individual life so I know what I'm supposed to be

up to.

Because I know my season. Years ago, friends, I was at home. I looked out my picture window. My neighbor was building an addition on his house. All he had done was the slab. It was like a 40 by 20 slab, nothing else done. And in the middle of it was a 12 foot step ladder. Why it was there I have no idea. But on top of the 12 foot step ladder was his not quite 2 year old boy, no adults in sight. I go out of the house, run across the street, climb the ladder, get

the boy safely down. I saved the boy's life. Probably he has no idea. He has no idea, but he was not at the right stage to be at the top of a ladder. I've told you before, took my dad off the roof when he was 85, and a two-story roof sweeping his chimney. 85 years old, hid his ladder. Might have saved his life. He's not at the right stage to be on a ladder. If I'm doing the wrong thing for my stage of life, I'm either going to fall and get hurt.

Or I'm going to harm someone else. Or I'm going to miss something that I really shouldn’t. Be up to, I've got to say to myself, what stage am I in? What time is it in my own personal life? My dad said to us, son, I'm going off his property in a box. Do not even talk to me about a care home. I'm going off this property in a box. Don't talk to me. He didn't know what time it was in his life. The question is, do you know what time it is in your life? What time is it right now?

What time is it right now?

Well, I'll say it's time for two things. Number one, it's time to figure out what season I'm in and therefore what I should be doing.

 And it's time for Dave Gibson to stop talking. Let's pray.

Lord, we're deeply grateful for the kindness you've shown to us. Thank you so much for this book. I'm asking for each one of us so that we would get very clear about what season we're in, what time it is in our personal life, and we'd be very dedicated to living skillfully in our season and in our relationship.

We ask this in Christ's name. Amen.