Eternity on My Mind (Part 1 of 2)

The Bible teaches that the frustration and dissatisfaction. We experience in this world is actually a God-given burden. But what purpose does that burden serve doesn't God want us to be happy to hear the answers today on Truth for Life as Alistair Begg continues our study in the book of Ecclesiastes and I just turn your Bible to Ecclesiastes chapter 3 Ecclesiastes 3 and were going to be the first 15 versus there is a time for everything in a season for every activity under heaven. Time to be born in a time to die. Time to plant and a time to uproot a time to kill and a time to heal. At times appeared tear down at the time to build a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. Time to scatter stones and a time to gather them time to embrace and a time to refrain time to search and a time to give up a time to keep the time to throw away. A time to tear the time to mend the time to be silent in the time to speak. Time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace. What does the working again from his toil. I've seen the burden God has laid on man. He has made everything beautiful in its time is also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for men than to be happy and do good while they live that everyone may eat and drink and find satisfaction in all his toil. This is the gift of God.

I know that everything God does will endure forever. Nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God doesn't so that men will revere him. Whatever is is already been and what will be has been before.

And God will call the past to account on then you might want to keep your Bible open father we pray that as we study the Bible together that you will help us that the spirit of God might be our teacher. You will save us from ever from flights of fancy that you will break the bread of life to us. Distance simply and as clearly as Christ broke the bread by the shores of Galilee, to the physical benefit of those who were in attendance may do so again to the spiritual benefit of each of us, for in his name we pray. Amen through the corridors of sleep past the shadows, dark and deep.

My mind dances and leaps in confusion. I don't know what is real.

I can touch what I feel and I hide behind the shield of my allusion so I'll continue to continue to pretend that my life will never end and the flowers never Bend with the rainfall no matter if I'm born to play the king or pawn for that the lying is thinly drawn between joy and sorrow. So my fantasy becomes reality and I must be what I must be in face tomorrow so I'll continue to continue to pretend my life will never end and the flowers never been with the rainfall. I don't know whether Paul Simon in the 60s I just finished reading the book of Ecclesiastes, or whether, in particular, you just finished reading Ecclesiastes chapter 3, but certainly his mind was going down very similar lines. That song from the 60s all these years ago and out still is representative of the kind of escapist nonsense that fills the minds of many people when they think about their lives before them today. One thing of which each of us can be certain. Is this that although the person sitting next to it is in this exact moment really has no concept whatsoever of what's going on inside us God who made us knows exactly where we are what we are thinking how we're feeling and how we are trying to make sentence of life as it is presented to us, not in a philosophical and abstract way. But in an intensely practical way in a way that deals with the fact of our singleness are married status that deals without employment or unemployment that deals with our fears about the future and our disappointments with the past. Our lives are an open book to the God who wrote this book to the open book of our lives. He brings this book in order that he might match his truth to our need this morning in the time that we have. I want to draw my thoughts around three headings and I want to give them to you and that way you will know that we're making progress. First of all, in verses 1 to 8 I like you to notice that what we have described for us here is what we might refer to as the same old routine. The same old routine is a description of the cycle of life. Someone is cynically said that what you have viewed in these 28 statements, 14 pluses and 14 minuses adds up to nothing at all, and there is a way of looking at our lives, which is exactly like that none of us have difficulty with these verses, we remember them. Some of them as are some of is as a result of the birds making them famous is not the birds in the trees as the birds with the guitars. To everything there is a purpose turn turn turn and many people that are familiar with these words didn't even know they were in the Bible at all, didn't know that God had actually written you could actually say the guard wrote a pop song good new I suppose we just leave that alone. But we know that there is a time to be born in a time to die. We were in control of our arrival and we are not in control of our departure, and that's part of the problem that is an immediate nuisance to men and women, especially those of us who like to be in control of everything, especially those of us who have those day timers that we fill out the little boxes and we take everything in it takes is often these things that are so crucial to us. We have really no control over the mental. All we can plan we can gather we can rake leaves, we can do a number of things. But in actual fact, we have no control over when we rake the leaves. I suppose it would be possible for us to go and cut down leaves off the trees in the middle of the summer and lay on the grass and then going rake them. I don't know why we would ever do that some strange fascination with raking but it would be possible to do but in the scheme of things, there is a cycle over which we have no control springtime brings it. The summer sustains it in the autumn watches it fall. There's a time for laughing. There's a time for morning and the time for dancing.

There's a time to scatter stones.

A time to gather them up as a time to embrace the time to refrain as your future father-in-law will tell you when you're over the house. I think it's a time to refrain Ecclesiastes 35 take your hand off my daughter. Thank you very much is a time to kill and a time to heal the same farmer are the same Shepherd that nurtures and cares for the sheep recognizes that there's going to be a day Kong went often in the cycle of things, it will be the farmer again. That takes the knife to the sheep to the land that he loved so much. If you read James Harriet but you know that's the case, and some of you would be prepared along with me in unembarrassed fashion to admit that you meet when you read those stories.

My children love it when I read them, especially because there are these long pauses when I'm reading you know about the old horse that was placed down in the end of the field.

The affection of the farmer for it and so on and eventually it has to go off. Bye-bye and my eye and I can still see my jewelry logo on the line. They don't want to look directly. Anybody want to see he's crying again, this is ridiculous.

He's crying about a horse.

Why would he cry about a horse because it expresses on the designated appeals to as if we have any care any affection, any interest at all. When you look at the same old routine, you find that you say things that you hear other people saying to you meet with an old friend and you say to them, haven't seen you in years, who would ever imagine that we would be here today in the Senate who ever imagine. We hear today doing this or you meet a friend from University. Did you ever see yourself doing that is or think you have a suits your scruffy rascal you did you ever think that you would suddenly be like other people what is happening to us as the cycle of life in the recent McCartney concert which I attended in Chicago.

There was one song in his said I think was noticeably missing you may have noticed that if you were here in Cleveland and that was the song when I'm 64. He didn't say it when you're 20, say hey when I'm 64 but now he's going after saying when I'm 94 or whatever else it is an order given the plunge that it had before.

What's happening to it.

Ecclesiastes 3128. The same thing that is happening to everyone else know the problem doesn't lie in the fact that life doesn't stay still.

We often see that it will if I could only arrest time.

As parents we say or if only we could have this moment forever with our children. If only we could take this moment now.

Husband may say to his wife on this particular anniversary and just in caps related and is live in this for a moment, but we know that we can, but that is not the ultimate problem. The ultimate problem is not that timing doesn't stop for us. The real problem is that we can only see a fraction of the movement of time and as we tried to make sense of our tiny little part in the vastness of all that we are aware that it really is tremendously insignificant and that when it is upon us dies something to the human psyche. That's why incidentally, so much of our lives are filled with noise and with music and with activities in hard to stop us from these poignant moments, overcoming us when we look at the routine of life and we say is this tyranny, or is this a wonderful rhythm in the search for signs of intelligent life in the universe, the one woman play featuring Lily Tomlin plans analogy, which should be avoided at all costs in in her opening monologue as Judy the bag lady.

She expresses all of the things she worries about the quite masterful piece of writing, and it builds and builds and builds until she finally says in the pathos in an strangeness of it is that you brothers lady who's essentially just out there in the middle of it all and she's and she looks up and she says I wonder about my place in the vast scheme of things, and then she says I wonder if there is a vast scheme of things. You see, that is the great fundamental question is when you realize here we are all the leaves are brown and the skies and I have been for a walk on a winter's day when I dropped into a church. I passed along the way California dream. Why we gotta get outta here. These leaves in the chilly blast of wind weights somehow another seeps in and sickles on our souls and its speaks of something about more than winter. What is it doing is confronting his with the cycle of life. It is confronting is with what is described here in the chilling impact of it comes into the hearts and minds of men and women and purposefully so. The hymn writer addresses it, time like an ever rolling stream players all its funds away.

The Queen Mary was built on the river client as was a Queen Elizabeth II.

The QE2 I was born on the client and this year as I stood on one of the bridges and looked at it. I thought about how the client has just been going and going and going before me all the time I've been gone.

And then when I came back just rolling along the same way from high up in the foothills of tiny stream builds into this vast why river that issues in the Firth of client Caterina Wade eroded material and by attrition picking things up and taking them away and the hymn writer says and that's exactly what happens to us, time pictures up like a ruling river bears all the way and we fly forgotten like a dream come to breakfast you see what I dreamt last night. I can remember what I dreamt about is the hymn writer. That's what it will be like Fries everybody believes that they will be remembered forever. But the fact is, everyone will see what what was his name again. Who was she, why is it on our own, we are unable to make sense of these things. Why is it that in the jigsaw puzzle of life. When we go to it. It always appears as if the bits missing from the box he look at the picture you look at the pieces you say there are not enough pieces here to make that picture. Why is that that brings me to my second head same old routine, followed by a whole new perspective of all new perspective the question. Incidentally, in verse nine what is the work again from his toil is not a question of financial question is not about remuneration far more foundational issue than that easy since it was the point of going to work. You work so you can get money to buy food so you can stay alive. So the goal to work get money to buy food so you can stay alive so you can go to work.

What is the work again from all his toil why my doing this I mean people say that all the time why don't even do this while looking the perspective verse 10. This is good news.

I have seen the burden God has laid on men.

In other words, the frustration that men and women experience is actually the result of a God given burden God given burden. How could this be read on. He's made everything beautiful in its time is also set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they can't fathom what God has done from the beginning to the end. In other words, God is creeds in the world. He's made a beautiful world and all of its pristine absolute perfection he sets it in time and space. He makes man male and female to know him to commune with him to walk with him in the garden to enjoy all the benefits of his companionship. Death is not designed into that system frustration is not designed into that system is all beauty.

It is all purity is all harmony. It is all perfection in that experience of communion God establishes all that will one day be the reality when he completes the picture. But man has turned his back on all that the designer had to say and as a result of that the notion of eternity. That is, in a manner woman's mind is something that actually tyrannize us texts because not only here in Ecclesiastes, but throughout the whole Bible.

For example, in Romans chapter 1, you may like to turn to it.

But Romans chapter 1 affirms what the rest of the Bible says, namely, that men and women are made with the knowledge of God. There's no escaping from the knowledge of God to resentment. Verse 19 of Romans one since what may be known about God is plain to them, that is, to men and women. Why, because God made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities, his eternal power. His divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what is been made so that men are without excuse for although they knew God did neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but the game became futile and foolish, and although destruction around and said a lot of things about science and their vast wisdom of cosmology.

It really became very foolish and giving up on worshiping the godhood made them.

They began to worship God that they made themselves inferior this morning as an atheist I want to tell you that the Bible know something about you that you're not prepared to acknowledge about yourself. You may seek to repress the knowledge of God. But you know that you can escape a knowledge of God. There are no ultimate atheists there. Only those who argue against what in the deepest recesses of their being. They know to be the case, namely, that God is and it is the very business of God which creates the die llama in the heart and mind of an individual thinking through God has created us for the purpose, and unless we discover and fulfill that divine purpose. We will never be fully satisfied with anything else that is offered along the journey of life and within the realm of Vanity Fair. This says the pundit is the burden that God has laid on men having made us for this pleasure having created is in his image.

We have to be forever dissatisfied until we come to know him and until we come to live in fellowship with what the Bible says is that you and I creatures of time what actually made for eternity that you and I live out the life that his hours were actually made for his presence therefore is no surprise that our lives would be marred by frustration and by confusion when we turn away from it shouldn't surprise us that if we choose to live in the dark. We can see similarities in God make himself known to me, listen, God is under no obligation to satisfy your intellectual curiosity.

He will cater to the genuine humble expression of a longing seeking heart, but he doesn't do tricks for the arrogance when a man or woman begins to think for a moment about their finitude. I was not in charge of my birth, I will not be in charge of my debt. I can make the leaves fall and I can't make the green shoots grow. I'm really actually in a process here, over which I have very very little control and fight.

I'm not sure how the double circulator system really functions I I really have no concept of of what would bring about renal failure. I don't know why it is that my eyes stick shot in the night and why that awake why when I wake up.

There still enough fluid in the I don't know why it is that there is synovial fluid in my joints that prevent me from becoming an arthritic basketcase.

I can explain why even of breath to breathe, to shout and search triumph of these Ohio State games and so on. What is it all, what is it all you see in man in all of his pride says it all. I'm in charge of this. I am in charge of this. You're in charge of nothing. Anything you think you're in charge of is an illusion. Everything your blistering and make God dance for you you is magnified himself in the beauty and order of creation.

You are spoken in the person of the son.

He who comes to us through the pages of a book that understands us. Once we begin to develop a new perspective on our same old routine. Our experience of life is totally revolutionized your listing to Alastair big on Truth for Life were learning today from the book of Ecclesiastes, a book that is full of wisdom.

While Alastair is working through a quick survey of this book, we think you'll find it well worth your time to dig into the important lessons in this portion of Scripture and to help you with that. We want to recommend to you. The book called living life backward many of us try to avoid thinking about the reality of death. It's easier to distract ourselves with the pressing issues of the day, but living life backward explains that death is a light God shines on the present to radically change our perspective. When death is in full view. We no longer seek to control life. Instead we begin to see life as a gift. Request your copy of living life backward when you donate today to give simply tap the book imager see in the mobile app or visit us online at truthforlife.org/donate.

We love sharing the gospel message your Truth for Life. That's our mission to teach the Bible every day. On this program, knowing that when God's word is heard God's spirit will work in the lives of many who are listening to convert unbelievers to establish believers in their faith and to strengthen local churches when you support financially and pray for Truth for Life. That's what you're investing. So if you are one of our financial partners. Thank I'm Bob Lapine. We hope you enjoy your weekend and are able to worship with your local church and join us Monday will find out how God who is sometimes our burden maker becomes God, the burden taker Bible teaching of Alastair big is furnished by Truth for Life. Learning is for Living