God's Sovereignty Over Time

Steve McKenzie

Ecclesiastes • Sermon • Submitted 5 years ago

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INTRODUCTION

GOOD MORNING CROSSPOINTE

Good Morning and Happy Mother’s Day

Newest Mother

Most Children

Most Grandchildren

Also thinking of those who may be grieving this mother’s day

The person whose mother has passed away

The wife longing for a child

The young lady who longs to be married and start a family but sits alone

We mourn with those who mourn and we celebrate with those who celebrate

ECCELESIASTES

Today’s message is timely as we continue in our series through the Book of Ecclesiastes, continuing into chapter 3

Chapter 1:

After Adam and Eve rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden, people have struggled to find meaning and purpose apart from God

Ecclesiastes tells us that these pursuits are meaningless - like trying to grip smoke

Chapter 2:

Last week we learned how 1) pleasure, 2) knowledge, and 3) work are meaningless pursuits when done apart from God.

The same can be said when make family and children God in our lives.

When finding a spouse is our solution to finally being happy - only to discover new facets of annoyance

Then children are your solution to finally being happy - but then in the midst of the joy you realize just how selfish and impatient you can be.

BIG IDEA OF TODAY’S MESSAGE

God is sovereign and good. This truth brings comfort and challenge to our daily lives.

We will see this initially in the beautiful complexity of a poem (1-8)

But those verses introduce a problem that the remainder of the chapter answers through prose (9-22).

SOMETHING FEELS WRONG

“Eternity in their hearts...”

We are bound by time and cannot control what happens.

God is not bound by time and he has authority over everything.

CHAPTER ONE

Death puts an end to our repetitive quests for greatness and gain. Instead, death teaches us that we are simply part of one generation who came after the one before with another generation coming after ours.

Life is but a vapor

CHAPTER TWO

Our pursuits and pleasures that we strive after will always slip through our fingers. No fulfillment, no satisfaction.

CHAPTER THREE - INTRO

The preacher brings both of these ideas together, the big picture (our whole life, chapter 1-2), and the individual parts (seasons of life, chapter 3).

We will discover hope in the truth that we cannot control either the big picture of our lives

There is hope as we embrace two truths this morning:

First, we enclosed by within the boundary of time and have no control

Second, God is not bound by time and he is completely in control

LET’S PRAY

3:1-8 Poem - Beautiful Complexity

READ 3:1-8

This is only half of the story

3:9-22 Prose - Comforting Challenge

Punches us in the face to fully understand.

See how these words are not just a pretty poem but how they need to radically reshape our perspective on life And who God is in the midst of the unfolding events of our lives.

(9-22) Punches us in the face to fully understand.

BEAUTIFUL COMPLEXITY (3:1-8)

BUILDING SOMETHING

Tapestry, legos, IKEA

“Our lives are made up of so many different pieces...”

PATTERN

Opposite or extremes - everything in the middle

Look at the positive and ‘negative’ statements

PROBLEM TO PROSE

Plant

heal

BEAUTIFUL COMPLEXITIES

Connectedness

There are seasons in the world that act upon us (war and peace), but almost every pair in the poem involves our connectedness to others.

From the moment of birth to our death, we are profoundly relational beings, and most of the seasons of our lives are taken up with navigating the different stages of our relationship and the effect they have on us.

We dance at a wedding, and we mourn the loss of the one we danced with. We laugh together, and we weep for what the people we used to laugh with have done to us.

We are relational beings. Connected to one another. The stories of our lives are not written in isolation from others but our stories are woven together in some parts and then torn at times.

Without thinking, we reach out and touch, but we instinctively respect a different emotional and physical boundary with someone else. We

Control

Random order of the poem - it doesn’t move through life chronologically

We check our calendars and agenda everyday, but we don’t set the seasons of life.

Rather, our times are marked by being a son/daughter, and brother/sister, becoming a wife or husband, mother or father.

These are the seasons God gives.

Life is also full of flaws. Killing, tearing down, weeping, mourning, hating, warring: these are the times of life we will experience that shows us in the most painful of ways that we live on the other side of Eden, under the curse caused by sin.

We make the best decisions we can every single day but deep in our hearts we know that these challenging seasons of life are completely out of our hands.

It’s just one phone, one doctor’s visit, one day.

Nobody that I know places this on the calendar yet we’ve all come to expect these seasons. Deep within we know that we don’t have control

We don’t say - 20 minutes of fighting with my spouse Tuesday night

Tragic news on Thursday that will turn my life upside down for 6 months

Then of have 12 months of no problems to recover.

Conflict

Even non-Christians read at funerals. The byrds sing, “Turn, turn, turn…”

Lyrics

To everything (turn, turn, turn)

There is a season (turn, turn, turn)

And a time to every purpose, under heaven

… to everything there is a season...

Anyone with enough experience can dramatize life in a way that shows the rhythmical patterns of life.

v. 9 though - is the sucker punch to the gut - “what gain has the worker from all his toil?”

Nothing - you’re dead!

You came, you saw, and you didn’t even get an ugly t-shirt

Let’s move beyond popular songs and the beautiful complexity in the poetry of 3:1-8 and look at the prose in 3:9-22.

It’s here that we will receive both 1) comfort, and 2) challenge

READ 3:9-15

COMFORT & CHALLENGE (3:9-22)

“The reality of our death and final judgement is a good thing. It gives our actions meaning and weight, and it gives my experienced losses and injustices a voice in God’s presence. What is past may be past, but what is past is not forgotten to God, and because he is in charge and lives forever, one day all will be well. Every single thing that happens will have its day in court.” David Gibson

This brings both comfort and challenge

COMFORT

(1) GOD IS LOVINGLY SOVEREIGN

CHILD VS ADULT PERSPECTIVE

Do your kids or nieces or nephews ever get upset with you because they know better?

Imagine a toddler, pulling on your leg, begging for a snack - while you make dinner.

You try to explain that you are making dinner and you’ll eat in a little bit but all they know is that they want something now.

So often the struggle between a child and their parents is a battle of perspective

Child sees - play, food, love, and sleep

Parent - are caring for the child’s health, education, personhood, while managing the responsibilities of a mortgage, marriage, sports practice for one child and dance lessons of another. Remembering to cut the grass and bring dessert to community group and the oil needs changed in the van...

The child is free to enjoy their childhood when the parents are wise and good

ADULT VS GOD PERSPECTIVE

Adults are like children when it comes to our own lives and God’s care and concern over us.

God does not exist within our timetable

3:11a “He has made everything beautiful in its time...”

3:11b “God has done from the beginning to the end.” - God is outside the span of time, unconfined

3:14 “whatever God does endures forever”

The adult is free to enjoy life because God is wise and good.

God isn’t being unkind to us by withholding all the details. He is giving us the space and freedom to trust him

“If we could see the end from the beginning, and understand how a billion lives and a thousand generations and unspeakable sorrows and untold joys are all woven into a tapestry of perfect beauty, then we would be God” David Gibson

GROWING SMALL

#adulting has become this thing

learning how to file taxes, pay bills, work a full-time job, have the responsibilities their parents once covered.

#childlike

God intends us to be like children who trust their parents to know best because they can see what the child cannot see. Even as adults we come to the comforting conclusion that we don’t have control of everything.

(2) GOD SHEPHERDS THE BROKEN (15)

What about the broken pieces in our lives?

The people who hurt or betrayed us. The jarring interruptions, unexpected joys, and unresolved tensions and difficulties.

Our stories contain tragedy AND joy. Hopes AND fears. In the midst of our darkest times we may ask, “will there ever be a time for justice?

The answer is, “YES!”

Ecclesiastes 3:15

READ 3:16-22

We are not like the animal kingdom because “God will judge the righteous and the wicked”

So what?

So every tear and every sighing sorrow for my wrongs and for the wrongs done to us were laid at the cross of Jesus.

There was a judgement on the cross

Jesus paid the penalty for sins and wrong.

The sins people commited against God and against each other.

There will be a judgement at the end of our lives.

God is Outside Time

Child’s frustrations - Parents see the big picture

Grown-ups are like children - God sees the big picture

Wisdom helps us understands that we only have a small perspective. Part of growing up is learning to grow small.

If the parents are good and wise then the kids have nothing to fear.

If God is good and wise then we have nothing to fear

God seeks...

3:15 “God seeks what has been driven away”

The imagery is suggestive of a shepherd seeking the stray, the wanderer

In this case, it is in regard to time - things lost, in the past, chased away by the passing of time

But they are not lost to God. He will dial black time and fetch the past into his present to bring it all into account.

People will give an account.

CHALLENGE

The truths of God’s sovereignty and goodness not only bring us comfort but they should also challenge the way we live every day.

(1) GOD IS IN CONTROL

Because God is outside time - he sees the beginning and the end simultaneously throughout all history.

God is good and a just judge

God is in control of everything that happens to you.

The message of Ecclesiastes is NOT:

life has good times and bad times

so just roll with the punches

The message of Ecclesiastes IS:

life is full of good times and bad - that we cannot control

The agenda / calendar, etc.

we can rest in God knowing that he is in control and he is good.

Therefore, we can live with the rhythmic patterns of life and accept not having all the answers - YET.

“Yet”, is key because we bring back and give account for each moment

(2) CONTENTMENT IN SEASON OF LIFE

Because God is in control - we can learn to be content in whatever season we find ourselves in.

The season you are in today will not always be your season.

Knowing this reality helps us be content and prepare for the chapters of our life that still lay ahead.

We have 6 children and at one point we had 5 kids aged (

The days seems to last an eternity

I was working full-time, going to school full-time while we lived in a narrow townhome.

People always said that time would fly by but it was hard to believer.

Now are kids are leaving the house one by one. Some days still feel like an eternity but the years fly by.

Life is like a roll of toilet paper

The further you get into it the fast it goes.

I think it’s a funny saying but it is also incredibly true.

A year to a toddler is like an eternity

Today - a year feels like a month

For those older - they seem to speak in terms of decades, not years.

Too often, we use our time to seek satisfaction in some future possibility rather than living in the times God has given us today.

This is contentment:

“Being present in the moment with a joyful awareness of God’s satisfying presence”

He is sovereign and he is good. - we can find our soul satisfying satisfaction in him.

CONCLUSION

JOURNAL

Do you believe God is a sovereign and good Father?

Sovereign and good

Father

Since God is Sovereign, are you allowing him to have control or are you striving for control in your life?

Since God is God, are you trusting God and content with your current circumstances or are you distract and anxious for the ‘next’ thing?

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