April 19, 2026 | The Quest for Meaning
The Quest for Meaning | Ecclesiastes 1:12–18
Ecclesiastes 1:12–18
I the Preacher have been king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.
What is crooked cannot be made straight,
and what is lacking cannot be counted.
I said in my heart, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” And I applied my heart to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a striving after wind.
For in much wisdom is much vexation,
and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow. (ESV)
In “The Quest for Meaning,” Jed Gillis explains that Ecclesiastes 1:12–18 exposes the emptiness of trying to find meaning through wisdom, knowledge, or control. Solomon searches deeply and honestly, yet concludes that life in a fallen world remains frustrating, humbling, and beyond human mastery. The more he learns, the more he sees what is broken, and knowledge alone cannot straighten what is crooked or satisfy the heart. The sermon presses the listener to see that much of our striving is really an attempt to be in control, but that pursuit only brings sorrow and restlessness. Instead of chasing meaning through understanding everything, we are called to admit that we are not God, to let go of the need for control, and to find joy in trusting God and delighting in what he delights in.
Transcript of The Quest for Meaning | Ecclesiastes 1:12–18
Jed Gillis: We are gonna be in Ecclesiastes chapter one, continuing our series. And I wanna say before we get started, if you weren't here last week and you didn't hear how we started off in Ecclesiastes, one of the things that we do believe here at Berean Bible Church is that God has given us his word and he's given it to us in order. The way that he intends it is not just to be received as little bite-sized chunks. But he's given us his word so that we can see here's an entire book of Ecclesiastes. But not only that, the entire book of scripture. And so I invite you, if you weren't here last week, you can go on our website, on YouTube, on Facebook, you can listen to the first message of Ecclesiastes. And if you, as you go throughout this series, if there are times you're not here, that's always there, you always have the opportunity to go and listen so that you don't just catch one little slice of Ecclesiastes, but really the whole message, the whole point that Solomon has for us and that God has for us.
The Question of Meaning
Jed Gillis: This week, we'll be looking at really verse 12 through verse 18 of chapter one, because Solomon is gonna take us to an ancient question. Something that really is all over our world, and that is the the question, the desire, the search for meaning in this human life.
Think of the person who climbs the corporate ladder and they get to the career that they wanted. They're successful. They get the corner office at the big company, the salary they want, the benefits package they want. They do all of that. And over and over we hear people say things like, is this all there is? I made it to the top of the ladder I was trying to climb. Now do I just stop? What's the meaning? What's the purpose of this life?
Or the flip side, the person who never even gets close to the career that they wanted, and at some point that dream dies and they say, what was the point? What was the meaning?
Or a person who defines themselves by what they do. Maybe it's not their job. Maybe it's their charity work or their discipleship or their volunteering in church and something happens. There's a, a physical crisis, or you just get old enough to the point that you can't do all the things you used to do, and you say, what's my meaning? What's my purpose?
We're so driven to think this way, we can't even get rid of it. Francis Schaeffer said this, all men have a deep longing for significance, a longing for meaning. No human, regardless of their theoretical system, of their beliefs. No human is content to look at themselves as a finally meaningless machine. Which can and will be discarded totally and forever. God made us in his image. We can't get rid of that desire.
Even those people who deny God will express something like this. Stephen Hawking famous scientist says this. He says, we're just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. Well, that's encouraging. But he can't stop there. His next sentence is, but we can understand the universe.
First off, I wanna know how you think minor monkeys on an unimportant planet can do that with any confidence. But that's beside the point for what I'm making right now. The point is he can't take out the part of him that says there's gotta be a meaning somewhere. I can understand this randomly chaotic world that shouldn't have a meaning in theory. But even those who deny God, they won't do this.
I, I went on Google and I searched quotes about the meaning of life. If you want a fun rabbit hole to go down, there's a lot. I want us to sit with this for a second. I have a couple more I'm gonna read. I want you to think about this because many times we go through life in an unexamined sort of way. I just live my life. I get up, I eat breakfast, I go to work. I eat lunch, I eat dinner, I come home. There's a lot of eating. I guess there's sleeping in there. There's all these things that just happen over and over and over, and we can stop, go, wait, what's the point of all this? Well, people have thought about it.
A French philosopher. Said this, if we believe in nothing, so if we don't have God, if we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning, and if we affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.
Isn't that what we hear in our world? Everything is possible. You can do anything you want. Why? I don't know. That's what's out there. People who think deeply about questions like this, that's the kind of way he thinks about it.
Another person, this one was a Christian, said this, people have enough to live by, but nothing to live for. They have the means but not the meaning. We live in a very affluent society. That guy who gets the corner office job, he's got all the stuff, but you go, what's the point?
Another scholar who wrote in 2007, a book on the modern age, Charles Taylor was his, his name, his book's called The Secular Age. He says this, there is a widespread sense of loss in the modern world, if not always of God, than of meaning. People all around us want to know what is the point of life? Is there any meaning to this life?
And it's only deeper and worse in a world with artificial intelligence because now we have to go wait. They're better at a lot of things than I am. ChatGPT is way better at research than I am. It can put together all kinds of interesting things and you start going, wait, what's the point of humans? People whose worth was built on their job and artificial intelligence may replace it in a year, two years, five years, 10 years? It just deepens the question, what is the meaning of my life?
And that's where Solomon starts. After what we looked at last week where he says, life is just fleeting. It's like a breath. You can't hold it. It's good, but it's like a breath and you just, you can't even wrap your arms around it and control it. Life is, we use the Hebrew word hevel, it's like.
Since that's true, verse three of chapter one. He said, well, what is gain? Where can you profit if life is fleeting like that and you can't control, if our lives go by so quickly compared to the earth and the universe, then what is the meaning? What lasts, what satisfies, what guarantees that we, our lives have value? That's the idea of gain. There's value, there's profit.
Solomon's Search for Wisdom
Jed Gillis: That's the context when Solomon gets to verse 12, he says, I the preacher, have been king over Israel in Jerusalem, and I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven. It is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight and what is lacking cannot be counted. I said in my heart, I have acquired great wisdom surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me, and my heart has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I applied my heart to no wisdom and to no madness and folly. I perceive that this also is, but a striving after wind for in much wisdom is much vexation and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
Solomon: King and Sage
Jed Gillis: So this is how Solomon starts off this section. After his introduction, he calls himself the preacher. That may not be the way we think of preacher. The word literally comes from like the gatherer, the one who he gathers an audience so that he can speak to them. He's taking his role as both king and as we know from scripture, a wise king. So he's both king and, and sage, if you will.
And he says, I gather together I want to tell you what I have done. He says, I've started out, I pursued this quest to seek and to search, to spy out, to investigate. He wants to find knowledge.
Now, think about the kind of audacity of this claim, really. He's saying, I want to know everything about everything. That's how he starts. I'm going to seek out the answer for everything about everything.
And Solomon, of course, he had the resources in his context. More than anyone else to try to do it. He had the riches, he had wisdom that God said he was going to give him wisdom beyond anyone else. He says, I'm gonna get this information.
Again I'm, I'm struck when I look through Ecclesiastes by how modern the questions Solomon deals with actually are.
There's another guy who wrote on modernity. His name is Zigmund Bauman, which is a great sounding name. He said this in, in our modern culture, there is a suspicion. There is always a suspicion that one is living a lie or a mistake, that something crucially important has been overlooked, missed, neglected, left untried and unexplored. That's what Solomon felt. He's saying, look, maybe I missed something.
Don't we feel like that sometimes? Don't we think maybe I missed something for how my life was going to work out a little bit better. What if I'm living a lie? What if I devote my life to this cause or this purpose or this relationship and I missed something? That's the desire. Solomon saying, I'd wanna make sure I don't miss anything. I have this knowledge. In other words, he's saying, if I can fill in the gaps of my learning, whatever else I need to understand, perhaps I can find meaning in a fleeting life in a fallen world.
It's like he's saying this. If I just knew enough about how things were going to work out, then I could control my circumstances.
Don't we put so much hope in that?
If I just knew exactly how every decision was going to work out, then I could control my life. And if I can control my life, then I know that my life has value and therefore there's meaning to it. That's how we reason. That's how Solomon starts.
An Unhappy Business God Has Given Man
Jed Gillis: But it doesn't give him the answer he wants. If you read verse 13, he gives you the conclusion. Thankfully, you don't even have to wait for the end of the book to know the conclusion to that pursuit. He says, I've applied my heart. And it is an unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with.
Now, one of the challenges we have in Ecclesiastes is that the, the Hebrew in this book is, it's hard. It's hard 'cause you're translating. It's hard 'cause it's poetic. It's hard for lots of reasons. But when he says there's an unhappy business to be busy with, depending on the translation you're looking at, you might see it say something like grievous toil. You might see it say, uh, some other dissatisfying that might be part of what it says for grievous.
Really there's three different things, three different ideas that are part of this phrase. Solomon's saying, life on this earth is going to have an element of work. It'll be hard. There's toil, there's labor, there's work, there's some element of grief or dissatisfaction, something that you go, this isn't what I want it to be. And the other one that doesn't come out as much in the ESV translation is, is an element of humbling. So the end of this, when it says to be busy with that word, is also a root word of, of humble.
Solomon says, when I look at everything that I can see, I look at life and I say it's hard, it's sad sometimes, it's dissatisfying, and it's humbles me.
Now when you look at life, don't you see some of those same things? I do. I go, there's many good things, but life in a fallen world.
Before the song we sang earlier, before death is no more. While there's pain, while there's tears, life is hard. Life is not ultimately satisfying. And it humbles me. And we think, bummer Solomon, thanks a lot.
But we shouldn't be surprised by this. Think back to Genesis. When God pronounces the curse, when he says, now you've sinned, this is not going to be the Garden of Eden anymore. What does he tell Adam? You're going to work. So that you'll get food from the ground. And after he eats that food, is he going to be satisfied or does he still need more food?
He still needs more. So there's work and it's dissatisfying. And the whole point is they said, we wanna be like God, knowing good and evil. We wanna determine what we can and can't do. And God says, well, now with the curse after the fall, you'll be humbled. It's there from the beginning of the book. Life in a fallen world is hard, not ultimately satisfying, and it humbles us.
It's not that far off from what Paul says in Romans either. When he says, all creation does what? Groans, groans. It's bad, it hurts. Solomon is not making a cynical exaggeration.
Now, you could easily, quickly object and say, but Solomon, there's a lot of good things. I mean, it's pretty bad when you look at God's creation, even if it's fallen and you're like, it's all terrible, awful sad. Okay, Solomon, calm down. You know, if Solomon were saying this in our modern world, we'd probably tell him to go get a snack and take a nap and hope he feels better.
But Solomon through this book is going to say, actually, it's interesting if you just look at the number of times the words are used. He does talk about work a lot. He talks about joy more than he talks about vanity. Did you know that? If you go look up the words related to it over and over, he says, this world has joy.
Like, wait a minute, Solomon, you just said. It's an unhappy business, but then you said, this world's full of joy. How does that work? That's exactly the question Solomon wants you to have at the beginning of this book, and hopefully the answer we'll have at the end.
He's not just cynically exaggerating. He's saying this is an accurate diagnosis. This is just what it is. As finite creatures in a fallen world, we have difficulty that humbles us.
How many times does life remind you that you aren't God? Every day, right? How many times does life remind you? You actually can't control everything about your life? Every single day.
What Solomon is saying is, that's not a fluke. You're never going to change that. He's saying that's the way life is. Life on this side of heaven. Under the sun is frustrating.
Jay Vernon McGee said it this way. This is God's universe and God does things his way. You might think you have a better way, but you don't have a universe.
Solomon wants us to sit with that to say you are not, in fact, God, you can't control your life. It is good to be humbled in that way.
In fact, it's even a relief. Have you ever heard maybe somebody describe a difficult situation with their family or their church or their job and you think, I'm glad I don't have to fix that problem?
I feel that way when we're humbled to remember, I'm not God. That's just saying. He's the one who's gonna deal with the problems in his universe, not me. That's a relief. It should be.
Striving After Wind
Jed Gillis: So why does Solomon Reese's conclusion verse 14? I've seen everything done under the sun, and he gives us the phrase we used before. All his vanity is, hevel, is fleeting. You can't grab it, you can't hold it, you can't save it. It's like breath. It's a good thing, but you can't save it for tomorrow, and because it is striving after wind.
What a interesting picture. If we went out and if it was windy today and I were to talk to maybe some of our really young ones, say, go try to grab the wind.
Would they do it? Maybe they'd try, but they can't, and we all know that. You can chase it, but you'll never catch it.
In this picture, the problem isn't the wind. The wind is a good thing. The problem is you're trying to use the wind the wrong way. You're trying to catch it, to grab it instead of using it the way that God intends for it to be used.
For example, if you have a, a sailboat, wind is a good thing, right? If you put your sails correctly, let's just say I don't have a sailboat. I've got a speedboat, and I tell you I'm going to go out and I'm gonna bottle up some wind. Pour it in my gas tank and then I can use it whenever I want to. Hopefully, even our youngest people in here know that's not gonna work, but that's what he's doing.
He's saying, look, you're trying to control your life in a way that you are never meant to control it. You're trying to bottle life, pour it in a tank, and control it exactly like you want it. He says, that's not how it works. You're just chasing after it and you'll never get it.
I know I've heard a few people when we've talked about the book of Ecclesiastes, you'll say, it's really depressing book. Here's what I wanna say to you about that. Solomon wants this book to be utterly and completely depressing If you're trying to control your own life. He wants it to be that way. If that's what we're doing. If you're trying to chase after wind, he wants you to realize it will never, ever work.
But he doesn't want it to be depressing overall.
The, the phrase driving after wind could also be translated feeding on wind. Again, think about if you go out, you go, I'm hungry, I'm gonna go eat some wind. That would never work. It's, it's going to be dissatisfying in that picture too. Wind isn't bad. You're using it the wrong way.
If you try to make wind something that you eat, it'll never work. If you try to make wind something you control and use for your purposes, it'll never work.
So Solomon says, when you go about your life under the sun without considering God. And you try to control your life to find meaning for yourself. All you're going to do is find it never really empowers you to do what you want to do, and it never really satisfies. It's breath, like chasing after wind.
It's really is one of the most fundamental observations will get in Ecclesiastes because we all want control. We all want control in our lives. We have different ways of doing it. Some of us want control by the bank account and the retirement. Some of us want control by popularity in relationships. Some of us want to put this mask of who we want to be in front of everybody so we can control what happens. There's a million different ways we try for control, but we all want it.
Here's what happens when you try for control and you don't have it, you get afraid. We often call it anxiety. It's kind of like your, your whole soul starts seizing up like internally. You, you get tight and seized up because you go, I can't control things the way I want to.
If you imagine, I'm always, when I go to like a rodeo and you see the bull riders, first off, those guys are crazy. I cannot imagine. I would not last, I wouldn't even get on it. Let's be honest. Imagine if that guy gets on there and goes, yeah, I'm gonna control this bull. No, you're not. We've all seen it. You don't stand a chance but you, no, I'm gonna tighten every muscle in my body and I'm gonna control this bull. All you're gonna do is get thrown off faster and get hurt.
But that's what we do emotionally. We go, here's life. I'm gonna control it, and we tighten up everything and we're all paralyzed in our soul. And God looks at us and goes, you, you're not God. You weren't made to control it.
More Knowledge Won't Solve Your Fundamental Problem
Jed Gillis: So Solomon wisely, I think obviously he's wise in the way he goes about it. I think it's instructive that he doesn't start with chapter two and talk about wealth and achievement and labor and all those things. He doesn't start start by talking about pleasure. He starts at maybe a more fundamental issue, what you know, what you understand, and he says, knowing more things won't solve this problem.
It will not give you control over your life the way we all want it. And actually it exposes itself. So notice he says in verse 15, he gives you a proverb, not surprising for Solomon to come up with a proverb. He gives you a proverb. What is crooked cannot be made straight. And what is lacking cannot be counted.
In other words, knowledge may tell you what's wrong, but it can't fix all the problems you wanna fix. If we go back to Adam and, and the curse knowledge can tell you the thorn will grow, but nothing you know will stop that thorn from growing. Some of you like to garden. You put down that, you know that black paper that's supposed to keep everything from coming up through it and it slows it down, does it stop it all? No.
We know this. There are problems we can't fix. Think about, I just read about a guy who has spent millions and millions and millions of dollars to try and keep himself from aging. First off, he looks really weird, so I'm not sure that that's helping him all that much, but let's just say he's successful and lives to be 150 years. Still faces death. It's a problem that he goes, that's not the way life's supposed to be, and nothing he knows will ever solve it.
What is crooked, wrong, bent, can't be made straight. Think about when you have a broken relationship with a friend or a spouse or a child, and you think, I just want to know how to make this better.
There are wise principles and wise things we can pursue, but you've been there, when you say, I've done all that I know and I've asked people and I've tried, and it's still not right, no amount of knowledge is going to give you that kind of control.
The second part of that proverb, what is lacking cannot be counted. Knowledge can tell you you're missing something, but it can't perfectly define what's missing. It's like we're trying to figure out the meaning of life by taking a puzzle and put it together.
Some of you love puzzles. I, I remember one puzzle we did. It was the worst puzzling experience of my life. It doesn't take too much, but it was 500 pieces, not a big deal, right? It's front and back puzzles. It's butterflies. It's all butterflies, and there's only about four different kinds of butterflies on it, so they repeat all over the place. And on top of that, there's front and back. It's the same picture except turned like this, which essentially means there's at least eight places that every piece could go. If you only had the right eight pieces left, you could look at each one and go, I think it could go here and here and here. And the only way you knew it was wrong was that the veins on the butterfly's wings didn't quite line up. Super frustrating puzzle.
We got to the end, but we ended up, we're working on it. We started around dinnertime. We were a little bit crazy. We just kept working. We worked through the night. About 14 hours later, somewhere around lunchtime, we get ready to finish it. And guess what? The last piece didn't fit, so we had to go back and fix that.
Life's kinda like that. Sometimes you go, I'm gonna figure it all out. I know exactly how to go about this business problem so that I solve everything I'm gonna control and make sure I get the outcome I want. And you get to the end and go, this piece doesn't fit, something's missing and I can't control it. What is lacking cannot be counted. You cannot reason your way to control and meaning. That's Solomon's first point.
So he takes a second step and it almost sounds like the same thing. 'cause this doesn't read real obvious to us in English, but when he goes and says in verse 17, I applied my heart to no wisdom and to no madness and folly, when he puts madness and folly together like that, it's typically used in the Old Testament. The two are used to not just say something that's crazy, but the madness of disobedience. In other words, I think he's taking a step from, oh. I know these things to say, well, what if I know good and evil? What if I know right and wrong? I know the wisdom of obedience and the madness of disobedience. What if I know moral knowledge? Will that help me to control all of my outcomes?
In other words, if you say, I know what's good to do and what's bad to do, so I'm gonna do the good things and I know the circumstances in my life will turn out like I want them to. If that's what he's trying to do, I'm gonna know the good and bad. I'll make sure I do the good. So I get control that way.
And his conclusion, I perceived this also is, but a striving after wind. He's like, I'm trying to grab it. I'm trying to get control so that I know my life has value and meaning, and yet I don't see that control. He'll expound on that. He'll say, sometimes you do all these good things and you build something good with your life, and then you leave it to a fool and it's all wasted. What's the significance of that?
Sometimes, the More You Know, the Worse You Feel
Jed Gillis: He expounds on that throughout the book, but he gives us another proverb in verse 18. For much wisdom, as much vation or frustration, and he who increases knowledge, increases sorrow.
The more you know, sometimes, the worse you feel about it. That's true of even internally, right? The more I realize, oh, I sinned against God in this area, and go, I think I'm gonna deal with that. Okay. I took care of it. And then you realize, oh, actually that goes a lot deeper than I thought. Sometimes the more you know, the more you find sorrow or frustration.
Parents think about the way, when you have a hard conversation in your relationship, you, you and your spouse are dealing with something difficult. And your children, especially if they're young, you say, I don't want them to have to carry that burden. Why? Because you instinctively know sometimes the more you know the sadder it is.
That's what Solomon's discovering. Knowing more doesn't solve the problem that he feels. It doesn't give him control so that he knows his life has value and meaning. Even knowing more about what's right and wrong doesn't give him that.
In many ways, this actually reflects the temptation Satan gave in the garden, right? Remember he comes to Eve and he says, oh God didn't mean you're gonna die. What he meant is you'll be like God knowing good and evil. Solomon's essentially saying, yeah, I'm gonna try that. I'm gonna really know good and evil and see if that solves the problem. And he concludes. This is just striving after wind.
Now as we go through this book, one thing I want us to return to over and over is to say, what on earth does an ancient wisdom literature piece of advice from a king who lived so long ago, what does that have to do with a world full of iPads and smartphones and the internet?
Sometimes that might be hard to find. This case, I don't think it is. Think about all the information that we have on the internet. How much knowledge do we have access to, right? You can go to Google and you got millions and millions and millions of pages of information. Say, I can't find what I want there. You can go to chat, GPT or Claude, or whichever AI you want to use and ask it to compile it and give it all to you in a nice summary.
If you decide you don't like machines, you can go to Reddit or Twitter and look at all the things humans have said about it. And if that's just all overwhelming, you can go to YouTube or Facebook and you'll get videos that they think you specifically would like, and it's curated just for you. We have so much access to information and yet people who study this kind of thing would say our internet generation is full of more anxiety than ever.
I thought knowledge and education was supposed to give us control and meaning and solve all that. No, as it turns out, Solomon was right way before the Internet. He who increases knowledge, often increases sorrow.
We're starved for real meaning. We have so much knowledge that we are outraged at a million things, but no closer to controlling any of them than Solomon was.
Be Willing to Say ""I Don't Know.""
Jed Gillis: So I want to encourage you one way to take what Solomon says here and apply it to your life. Be willing and maybe even eager to say, I don't know.
I know that doesn't sound really strange, right? It feels like something that should be easy for us, but I find myself, when I don't know something, what do I do? I look it up. I don't even stop and think about it. I just look it up. It's good for us to stop and say, you know, I don't know.
When you go read, I don't care which news site. You go read supplies to all of them. When you go read a news site, you go, I don't really know what's going on. I actually don't have infallible omniscience on this or anything else.
That's part of Solomon's point. You weren't made to be omniscient and no amount of Google searches changes that. So be willing, be willing to say, I don't know.
And you think, well, if I don't know, I might be wrong. Absolutely. You might. But I think what we're usually afraid of is if I don't know, then I can't control what goes on. And Solomon's like Exactly. You weren't made to.
So we might ask. So should I just be like intentionally ignorant? Like I celebrate the fact that I don't know anything. No, Solomon's not saying live an unexamined life. He's saying that analyzing and trying to understand your life is not going to give you the control and meaning that you want. He's saying that sometimes we're so busy analyzing life that we forget to live it.
You say, I don't know how this is all gonna work out. I think especially, again, probably the generations that grew up more with the internet, get outta high school. When you start going, wait, what am I gonna do with life? I don't know. I could do this, I could do this, I could do this, I could do this. I've got all these, remember, everything is possible and nothing's important. I could do any of these options, but we're so paralyzed trying to make sure we get the outcome we want, that we forget to just decide something.
Solomon anticipated all of that. He says knowledge can't fix everything, can't always tell you what you're missing, and sometimes it just increases sorrow.
Is Your Goal Control or Finding Joy in God?
Jed Gillis: So I wanna ask you whatever generation you're in, how much of your meditation throughout the day, what you think on just constantly, how much of it is really trying to figure out everything so that you can control your life?
You meditate and you think, okay, how? How can I respond to my kids so that they do what I want them to do and they grow up to be like this? And that's where my mind goes all the time. How can I relate to God so that he will bless me and give me what I want? How can I do this in my career so that I get the result, the income, the whatever it is? How can I do all this and figure it all out so that I control the outcome?
Solomon's saying every bit of that's gonna be trying to grab wind. You won't get the kind of control that you want. So instead, don't pursue wisdom and knowledge or morality so that you control your life. Do it to have joy in what God finds joy in.
We celebrate. I, I was thinking about this. Really, I was trying to think, how do you talk about pleasing God in a way that's helpful? It's not that he's an enemy and I wanna pursue wisdom to make him my friend. We just went through Galatians. That was the whole point, is to say, actually no, God loves his people because of Jesus.
Okay, so if I'm not trying to live to control my life, how do I live so that I, I really do, please God. What does that look like?
And I thought of, I, I've had friends before who really loved, uh, a certain kind of music. And if you think my friend loves whatever kind of music, you could take your pick of a genre. My friend loves it. I wanna know how to love it too. What do you do? You come alongside that friend who loves it, and you just listen to what they enjoy. You say, I wanna try to enjoy that too.
In many ways, that's what God calls us to do. God delights in righteousness. God delights in wisdom. God delights in love and joy and peace and all of those things. So what do we do? We come alongside him and say, God, you delight in that. I'm not sure how all that works out, but I wanna delight in what you delight in. So we come and we share joy with our friend and our father, who is infinitely wiser than we will ever be.
Three Reminders to Take With You
Jed Gillis: I wanna give you three reminders. Actually, one reminder for three reasons I'd encourage you this week. Think about this. I am not God. There's your reminder. I know. Shocking, but how many times we live for control. I am not God. So thank you, God, because that means any good gifts that I have came from the good giver. I'm not God. So thank you. I'm not God. So I don't know. There are many things I don't know because I'm not God. When you face a difficult decision, when you face something, you go, I've gotta make a decision, but I don't know how this is all going to work out. You don't know because you're not God, so you go to God. I don't know. I need your wisdom. Help me to have joy in what you have. Joy in. But I don't know how it's all going to turn out and I won't. 'cause I'm not made for that.
And related I'm not God, so I am not in control. This week remind yourself. Jot down on a piece of paper. I'm not God, so thank you. I'm not God. So there's things I don't know. I'm not God, so I'm not in control. Jot it down where you can see it. Spend some time with God and ask him, where am I chasing after wind? Where am I striving for control?
One way I did this a year and a half ago. I went and jotted down, thinking back about a year or two, I just jotted down what was really encouraging and then what was discouraging. And then I said, God, why was that so discouraging? And you know what I found? I found that in the things that I was relying on myself and my efforts to control, I found anxiety and frustration.
Now, I didn't use those terms 'cause I wasn't looking in Ecclesiastes. But essentially, God, where am I chasing after wind? Help me not to do that. What am I looking to to give me control in my life? All I'll find is frustration and sorrow that way. So instead, God help me to trust you and to have joy in the things that you have joy in.
Solomon begins this book by coming out, swinging, if you will. By taking the things that we look to. I can figure it out. We'll get next week, pleasure, achievements, all these different things. Taking the things we most often look to. Here's how I'll gain control. Solomon comes out just landing haymakers on all of those things and saying that is never going to give you control, because underneath it is a desire to really be God instead of being humbled before him.
But the good news is we don't just have Ecclesiastes, we also have Philippians two, which says, let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus, who took on himself the form of a servant and became obedient unto death, even the death of a cross. So if we ever wonder, can I let go of my pride and be humbled, we can look to a savior who humbled himself all the way to death for us.
And by God's grace, we can let go of our attempts to clench our souls together in control and say, my risen king reigns.
So I invite you to take a moment this morning and respond to God in prayer. Rejoice that your king reigns, and ask God to remind you that chasing after the winds striving for control in my efforts will always be frustrating. I'll invite you to respond to him and then we'll sing.