Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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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
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