Beyond the Sun

This week, I will start leading a group through a look at Tommy Nelson’s study of Ecclesiastes (A Life Well Lived: Living with a Perfect God in an Imperfect World). Always love this book of the Bible even though it seems so bleak. I guess it because we get a chance to share the wisdom of Solomon and who else has received God’s gift more abundantly. Solomon had more wisdom, wealth, influence, power and everything else then any of us will ever have and he comes to one conclusion over and over and over again…it is all meaningless. No matter what we do under the sun we end up right where we started, dust.

Life is a treadmill.

Get up, cup of coffee, breakfast, shower, brush teeth, drive to work, …, repeat, repeat, repeat. Even when we break up our routines with the special things like holidays or vacations, those are really just repeats done on a less frequent basis. No matter how much I cut my hair, do the laundry, trim the lawn or rake the leaves, I am relegated to repeat.

Ah, but maybe we live for the pleasures of life. Solomon walked through the world of pleasure on a truly epic scale. He blew the doors off with countless parties, a thousand women, grand building projects, multitude of servants, along with more gold and silver then he could count. Everything his mind could conceive - he did. He had the resources to do anything his heart desired. He undertook one of the world’s great experiments and actually tried it all. And yet his words still echo, meaningless.

The chase for more and more and more and more never reaches the conclusion we are after. The consuming focus on this momentary visit to this place called earth has never changed the results. Wise or fool, rich or poor, driven or lazy, all come to the same outcome. We die, our friends gather and remember us for an hour, grab a sandwich on the way back to the office then by the next morning everyone has returned to the treadmill. Our stuff is handed off to someone else and the wind blows through and it was as if we never existed. As Solomon found out, everything under the sun is meaningless.

So why do I love this depressing look at life? Because the wise Solomon did find an answer in his experiment. He shares with us an antidote other then a leap from the nearest tall building. He tells us simply - Enjoy!! Enjoy what God has given you. The simple things like eat, drink and work. These really are where the physical world actually makes sense. Then spend a moment and find God in these gifts. The answer is found when we look beyond ourselves, above the horizon and beyond the sun. John 10:10 says it best, Christ brings the difference between just the existing and the chasing of the meaningless, to how we were truly created to live. He removes the futility from the soul and brings about the purpose we are actually dying for. By removing love of creation and focusing it instead on the Creator, we quit settling for the temporary and reach for the eternal.

Go beyond the sun.

Treasure

With all my heart I have sought You;
Do not let me wander from Your commandments.
Your word I have treasured in my heart,
That I may not sin against You.
Psalm 119:10-11

How this burst within my soul this morning. When have I last sought You with ALL of my heart? Where was I looking? Have I truly treasured Your word recently?

Oh I love the great verses, the ones that inspire! The ones that surely I must have right because I have heard them a thousand times. But what about the rest? How often the goal has been the stroll through the word not the hunt for treasure.

What to do with words that are deep and require time to dig. The ones that involve coming to a stop and getting down on my knees. Too little time, too much effort. Leave it lay! Surely there will be more up ahead.

No, the Psalmist sought You - not the end of a chapter. He clung to the entire word like a gem of great value. Never would he put it down for fear it would be lost. He understood the value.

The same treasure is still here thousands of years later. Placed within reach but it is requires responsibility to seek it, find it, hold on to it - not letting it slip from our grasp. Could there be anything of greater value then to catch just a facet of God’s magnitude and glory found in His word? Sell everything else - obtain it.

Establish Your word to Your servant,
As that which produces reverence for You.
Psalm 119:38

Change

Another New Year. Why do we use the change of a calendar to motivate change in us?

Perhaps there is benefit as we move toward a specific point in time to reflect and prepare if any real difference is going to be made from a resolution to transform. The end of each year stirs the need to evaluate where I have been and seek guidance on where I should have gone instead. I have to say 2007 seems to have been almost a year of “Spiritual A.D.D” for me. Any long term development was frequently interrupted by the next bright shiny object that distracted me. Ironically, I may have been more consistent in starting each day with Bible and prayer but where was the growth?

Discipleship, spiritual formation, Christian maturity, what ever one names it, requires a pattern of focus that seems just beyond my reach recently. Was it beyond my reach or was it really just my failure to stretch? This is not a science, nothing to chart or measure growth like the marks on the door frame when I was getting taller as a child. Just a question, “Am I different then I was last year at this time?” My heart aches at the answer.