Sermon Discussion Questions:
1. Read Eccl 9:7-10. Of the four things commended, which stands out to you the most?
2. How do you practice feasting without participating in gluttony, drunkenness, or excess? Or, at the very least, how do enjoy life but also practice self-denial?
3. What is one way you can grow in a "sober-minded liberality" towards enjoying God's good gifts in creation?
4. What is the "whatever" for you (see Eccl 9:10) that you struggle to "do with all your might"? How does the certainty of your impending death help motivate you? See Col 3:23-24.
5. "When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every created thing," (Augustine, City of God). What does Augustine mean?
Is Christianity basically a negative or positive religion? Is it here primarily to tell you “Do that and you will die,” or “Do this and you will live”? In To Kill a Mockingbird, the character Miss Maudie is a widow who spends most of her evenings tending her garden that is overflowing with flowers and dresses herself with bright colors. She is contrasted with a group she calls “foot-washing Baptists”—Primitive Baptists. Scout, the book’s main character who is a Methodist, assumes that Miss Maudie is herself a foot-washing Baptist: “My shell’s not that hard, child. I’m just a Baptist.” Foot-washing Baptists are those who “believe anything that’s pleasure is a sin.”
At one point in the story, a group of these “foot-washing Baptists” pass by her yard in wagon:
“The driver of the wagon slowed down his mules, and a shrill-voiced woman called out: “He that cometh in vanity departeth in darkness!”
“Miss Maudie answered: “A merry heart maketh a cheerful countenance!”
Now why would these ultra-conservative, foot-washing Baptists believe that tending to a garden would be sinful? They actually quote the book of Ecclesiastes to Miss Maudie (Ecc 6:4). It is quoted out of context, misunderstands what the word “vanity” means in Ecclesiastes, and doesn’t have anything to do with having a lovely garden, but it is Ecclesiastes nonetheless. But Miss Maudie correctly zips back her own Scripture (Prov 15:13)—a joyful heart makes your face glad, you look happy when the joy of the Lord is in your heart. You don’t look morose.
We want our church to be a church that takes the Bible seriously. There is a type of Christianity that treats God and His Word and the tragedy of sin lightly. We do not want to be that. But, there is an opposite danger that has stuck in the heart of seriously religious people from time immemorial. And that is a deep suspicion of pleasure, fun, beauty, and leisure…for their own sake. It is the heart that is so narrowly focused on thorns of sin that it begins to look at even the flowers with skepticism. It is the heart that sees Jesus eating and drinking with sinners, not calling them to repentance, but feasting with them…and assuming that He must likewise be a drunkard and a glutton (Luke 7:34). And there are fewer passages of Scripture found to dispel this miserly religion than our passage today in the book of Ecclesiastes:
7 Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do. 8 Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head. 9 Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. 10 Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.
Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge, but time and chance happen to them all. 12 For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them. - Eccl 9:7-12
Four things you are to enjoy: (1) Food and Drink, (2) Beauty and Appearances, (3) Marriage and Family, and (4) Work.
Food
Go, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has already approved what you do. - Eccl 9:7
Bread and wine are selected here because they stand as common staples of Israel’s diet and are frequently alluded to as signs of God’s favor (cf. Ps 104:15). So, they are representatives of all the food that one enjoys. Notice, we are not only told to eat our bread and drink our wine, but to do so with joy and with a merry heart. Not every meal must be a feast, but every Christian meal should be festive in some sense. Meaning, we do not view food primarily as a utilitarian means to an end, as fuel, or (God forbid) a necessary evil. We receive the gift of food with joy and gratitude, knowing that not only its presence, but its variety and flavors are all a sign of God’s over-the-top graciousness, beauty, and creativity. God did not have to make a world with strawberries, sweet potatoes, or sirloin steak. But He did. And not only that, He created us with the same sparks of His own creativity so that we could take those ingredients and experiment with them until we could create delicious and attractive looking meals with them. Made in God’s image, we create warm chocolate chip cookies, juicy cheeseburgers, and fresh scones.
God could have made it so that we were nourished by taking a small, flavorless tablet every day. That would be simpler. It would certainly be more efficient. But, apparently, God does not prize efficiency and simplicity that much. As Robert Farrar Capon writes, “Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than useful,” (The Supper of the Lamb)
Further, notice the doubling of the commands. We are not told merely to eat our bread, but to Go! and eat bread. Why the extra prod? Jesus did not only tell us to make disciples, but to Go! and make disciples (Matt 28:19). Why? To summon our attention and to spur us who may be tempted to be lazy in our evangelism—if you think you can just sit and wait for disciple-making to happen to you, then realize that you need to Go! and do it, put in intentionality and effort.
Likewise, Go! and eat your bread. How curious! Apparently, just as we may be tempted to be passive in our disciple-making, we may likewise be sluggish in pursuing a proper delight in the gift of feasting. Also, notice the end of the verse that gives you the basis for your feasting: “for God has already approved what you do.” Why is that there? Presumably, because you may be tempted to think that God does not approve of such indulgence. But He does. I love the way Eugene Peterson translates this passage in The Message: “Seize life! Eat bread with gusto, Drink wine with a robust heart. Oh yes - God takes pleasure in your pleasure!”
God delights in your delight. Let me prove it to you:
Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness.” - Acts 14:17
And if the way is too long for you, so that you are not able to carry the tithe, when the LORD your God blesses you, because the place is too far from you, which the LORD your God chooses, to set his name there, 25 then you shall turn it into money and bind up the money in your hand and go to the place that the LORD your God chooses 26 and spend the money for whatever you desire—oxen or sheep or wine or strong drink, whatever your appetite craves. And you shall eat there before the LORD your God and rejoice, you and your household. (Deut 14:24-26)
May God deliver us from the utilitarian commitment to efficiency and frugality that views feasting with suspicion, and in its place give our church sober-minded liberality as we eat our bread with joy and drink our wine with a merry heart.
Dress
Let your garments be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head.” - Eccl 9:8
White garments could be signs of purity or status, but coupled with the command to adorn yourself with oil, then we can understand that both of these are intended to serve as signs of celebration and joy. The NLT translates this passage as: “Wear fine clothes, with a splash of cologne!” Eugene Peterson, again, offers us: “Dress festively every morning. Don't skimp on colors and scarves.”
Does God care about how we dress? How we present ourselves? My guess is that if you rummage the storehouse of Biblical teaching on “how to dress” you will find almost only negative commands. Don’t dress immodestly, Don’t dress expensively. And the Bible does say that (1 Pet 3:3-4; 1 Tim 2:9). Vanity, the inordinate fixation on how other people perceive you, is a sin. But just as the vice of gluttony doesn’t mean all delight in food is wrong, so too does the vice of vanity not entail that all concern for how we look is inherently sinful. Beauty does not require immodesty or extravagant opulence.
Beauty is more than just how we look. A story can be beautiful. A vista can be beautiful. A song can be beautiful. Why is beauty so omnipresent in the world? Beauty is an attribute of God. God is beautiful, holiness is beautiful. He has made this world brimming with beauty. And He has placed within us an appetite for beauty. We hunger for beauty, and that hunger is not wrong. It is meant, in its right application, to lead us back into the beauty of God Himself. Simone Weil, the French philosopher, explains, “A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality as it appears to us. We are drawn towards it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers us its own existence. We do not desire anything else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not in the least know what it is,” (Quoted in Richard Harries, Art and the Beauty of God).
So, you buy a new dress, some cologne, a piece of art to hang in your home, you remodel your yard to expand your flower bed, you purchase tickets to hear a symphony live…and some sour-faced, foot-washing Baptist walks up to you and says: What good is that? It is a good in of itself, because it is beautiful. And the God I worship is a God of beauty, and I bear His image. If the Lord wills, one reason we hope to build not only a functional new building, but a beautiful building for our church is because we want to reflect the beauty of our God.
Why do people going through seasons of depression typically stop taking care of themselves? Because they have come to believe that there is no beauty in life, or if there is, it has passed them by. So why try to make yourself beautiful? Their outward appearance displays their own inner gloom. It is little wonder why therapists often recommend that those in a season of dark depression aim to still shower, to dress and get themselves ready, because how you present yourself is a small commentary on what you believe the world is like. Ecclesiastes was here first. Always let your garments be white, always adorn yourself with oil—why? Because God is good and true and beautiful and He has made this world and you in it to enjoy and delight in that beauty, to reflect His own beauty and orderliness. Life is dark, but there is light and high beauty forever beyond the reach of these passing shadows.
Marriage and Family
Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. - Eccl 9:9
Here the Preacher mixes into his teaching his common refrain: your vain life. What is “vain” in Ecclesiastes? It literally means a mist, smoke, or vapor. Something that is both insubstantial, enigmatic, and incapable of being grasped. But the overarching theme of the word is “brief.” God has apportioned to you a set number of days. So what should you do with them? Enjoy life with the wife whom you love. One of the most precious gifts that God gives is the gift of family.
What if you don’t have a family? (1) Enjoy the family that God has given you in the church—use the freedom that you have in your singleness to do what married people cannot do in serving and blessing others, in taking risks in ministry that those with children may not be able to make. And (2) pursue marriage. Maybe this is a fraught issue for some of you, but I am going to hazard this anyways, knowing that I will speak past some of your particular situations to address a broader trend (you can’t say everything in a sermon): There is a growing reluctance among young, single people to engage in relationships at all that doesn’t come out of godly contentment in singleness, but from a fear of rejection, or a desire to be established in one’s career first. There is a foolish way to pursue a relationship, of course, of course. But if God puts someone in your orbit, you should be willing to put yourself out there and engage in conversation, to flirt, to get to know this person more and see if they could be a spouse. If Ecclesiastes is telling us one way we enjoy life is with our spouse, then we should pursue that.
So, guys, let’s say you go to a coffee shop, and the barista calls out your drink and you think: Man, she’s cute. What do you do? You make sure you don’t look like a slob, and then while she makes your drink, you look at her, smile, and say, “How long have you worked her?” You ask questions, you be curious, you flirt! Now, she may think you’re a creep, she may be married, she may be Satan worshipper…but you’ll never know if you don’t try!
When I first met my wife, she was invited by a friend of mine to Bible study around a campfire, and I remember thinking, “Woah…she’s really cute,” and I don’t remember much else of what I did, but I remember that it took me being intentional. It didn’t happen by accident. We were married young, I was 21, she was 20—Hillary is quite literally the wife of my youth. I worked at Starbucks and a cheese and wine bar. Hillary worked part-time at a library. I wasn’t finished with school, we weren’t established in our careers. We were the proverbial young couple with nothing but love. But I can tell you, there is no sweeter gift that God has given me than my wife and our three boys.
They are “my portion” the Preacher tells me. The portion is what God has prescribed, gifted to me out of sheer grace. And they come with great responsibility. I am not as independent as I once was while single. My life is not my own. But to prefer independence over them would be to trade the expensive pleasures gained for the cheap pleasure of autonomy, to swap the feast (which may take more labor to prepare) for a tic-tac (easily prepared, quickly gone).
Work
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going. - Eccl 9:10
Sheol is the grave. If we remember from last week, we argued that the Preacher speaks from two perspectives throughout the book: the eyes of faith and the eyes of experience. The eyes of faith tell us that there is life beyond the grave, for the wicked and the righteous. Jesus Christ’s resurrection of the dead was the first time the eyes of faith and eyes of experience met together—life after death emerged into this world. But Solomon didn’t see that. So he lives by faith, and here he uses the eyes of experience to underline the finality of death, so that we may enjoy life. One pastor summarizes the book of Ecclesiastes as “Eat, drink, and be merry, for today we live!” The emphasis on our mortality isn’t to pacify us into gloomy silence, but to wake us up to the glory of being alive in God’s world as we enjoy God’s good gifts, like food, and drink, and dress, and sex, and marriage, and paintings, and music, and work. If you ignore your mortality, you may live like those things will always be there, and so will take them for granted.
And here, the Preacher zeroes in on our labor. Let me draw attention to a couple of points.
Whatever your hand finds to do
Whatever it is. You could be writing code, plumbing a house, writing a letter to your congressman, cooking a meal, leading a staff meeting, folding laundry. One of the gifts that the Protestant Reformation gave us was what Martin Luther called the “priesthood of all believers.” Which teaches that there is not a special class of priests who work holy jobs and thus have unique access to God. We all do. Which means that all of your vocations are holy vocations. A quote often attributed to Luther is, “The Christian shoe maker honors God at his work not by fixing tiny crosses onto his shoes, but by making excellent shoes.” There is no proof that Luther ever actually said that, but it sounds like something Luther would say, and it is a pretty good sentiment. We assume that there are Important Jobs and then there are the lame ones. And maybe you are frustrated that you don’t have an important job: you thought being a stay at home mother was going to be so great…and yet you are dogged by drudgery. You thought you were going to be the point person for the next big project, but you are just given a menial task. You were excited to lead the Bible study, only to find a few people show up. I’m not important! You may think that, but that thought hasn’t come from the Bible.
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might.
Work diligently, with creativity, effort, and skill. This is your lot that God has given you. You don’t have to be exceptional to be useful in God’s kingdom, you only need to be faithful. And remember, your time to work is limited. Soon, the curtains will close, and your opportunity to serve and labor will end. And you may think: Well, if I’m going to die soon, why care about working hard? Won’t all of this not matter anyways?
Consider what the Bible teaches elsewhere:
“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, 24 knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward.” - Col 3:23-24
“…rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, 8 knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord,” (Eph 6:7-8)
For truly, I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward. - Mark 9:41
All of these assume that the labor you perform here and now bears upon the quality of an eternal reward. You may ask “What on earth is that?” We, unfortunately, don’t have time to chase that down fully. But, what you can walk away from today knowing is that the most insignificant of tasks—giving a cup of water to a child—matters enough in God’s eyes to be folded into that reward.
Handling Our Pleasures
We tend to assume that when Satan tempts us, it looks like excess: drunkenness, gluttony, greed. We think of the White Witch from the Chronicles of Narnia and her enchanted Turkish Delight that Edmund gorges himself on and, in his lust for more, agrees to betray his family, if only he can get more. And that is a deadly danger. And we may feel like the voice of wisdom, the path of righteousness is found in running away from pleasure. But Satan is master of temptation, and he is limited not only to excess, but to asceticism as well.
Later, when the White Witch comes upon a small feast that Narnians are enjoying—a gift from Father Christmas—she screams at them: “What is the meaning of all this gluttony, this waste, this self-indulgence?” (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe) and proceeds to turn all of the Narnians to stone!
You can over-indulge. You can get drunk. You can eat more food than you should and do damage to your body, or use food as a coping mechanism. You can spend more money than is wise. Peter warns us that those under the influence of demonic teaches turn their adherents into slaves of the flesh (2 Pet 2)—they can’t tell themselves no! But, Paul also warns of the teaching of demons that “forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving” (1 Tim 4:3) and warns of the asceticism of “do not taste” that has the “appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh,” (Col 2:23). These people cannot tell themselves yes! They assume that the cheapest, the simplest, and most practical are also the best, the wisest, even the godliest. And they may begin to look with suspicion on pleasure, beauty, and fun.
Augustine wrote: “When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every created thing,” (The City of God).
Gold is not evil. Sex is not evil. Food, wine, work, art, vacations—none of these things are evil. Our problem isn’t the pleasures of this world, it is a disordering of our loves. We wrongly elevate gold in our loves, and so are willing to sacrifice justice in order to get it. We should love justice more. But that doesn’t mean that we hate gold. So it is with every created thing.
When we don’t see this we fall into one of two errors:
- We assume that doing things just for the sake of pleasure, fun, joy, or beauty is at best un-spiritual, or at worst evil. So we either live life in a constant low-grade fever of guilt for watching funny movies and upgrading our iPhones because we assume that if we were real Christians we would always be denying ourselves, or we dehydrate our life to a thin strip of jerky and cut all feasting and art and poetry and fine clothes out of it.
- We grow tired of denying ourselves or feeling guilty all the time, so we make a conscious decision to reject Christianity. We long for beauty and pleasure and it seems like the arenas of life that cultivate the best experiences of those things are outside of the Church.
How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings. 8 They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights. 9 For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.
- Ps 36:7-9
You may read that and assume that it is talking about “spiritual delights” in contrast with earthly delights. But the alternative I want to suggest to you is that the earthly joys of food, drink, sex, friendship, etc. are not alternatives to heavenly joy, but are intended to lead you up into contemplation of heavenly joys. They are windows.
“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
So, there you stand at Costco, and you have a thought enter your head: What if we made a really nice dinner and invited some friends over, and just had a nice dinner, just for the heck of it? You cannot do that all the time of course. But what is the Christian view on that? God has already approved what you do! Do it with joy and gladness.
