The Myth of Wealth Under the Sun

Transcript

Good morning, brothers and sisters, it is an honor to be here. Thank you for this opportunity and I’m gonna pray one more time because we have a lot of ground to cover today as we think about wealth under the sun. Who doesn’t love a sermon on money, right? So let’s pray. Our Father in heaven, we do thank you for your word. What a kindness, what a gift that you would give to us, Father, that we are not here scrambling around trying to figure out what we are to do with these lives of ours in this brief vapor-like life under the sun. Thank you, Father. Thank you for this wonderful book of Ecclesiastes, Father, that can speak to us, that can relate to us, that does not ignore the state of the world, does not overlook our pain and our grief and our frustration in living here, but actually acknowledges it

it and, Father, points us forward. And thank you for how this wonderful book points us to your Son. I pray that he is exalted this morning. I pray that Jesus gets the glory from our time together by the power of your Spirit, Father. In Jesus’ name, amen. And this morning does require a bit of a preface, if you guys don’t mind, before we make our way into the text as we think about wealth under the sun. To love anything, without exception, to love anything with an expiration date is a bit of a risk. It’s a type of risk. To love something with an expiration date makes us susceptible to suffering and sorrow and consistent disappointment. C.S. Lewis said this brilliantly when he said, to love it all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give

it to no one, not even an animal. And this is acknowledging that to love something that will not last forever is going to bring with it pain. Now, that’s not to say that we never love, as Lewis is pointing out. Some risks we deem more worth it than others. So we will love a person who we know will surely die, right? Family members, friends, spouse, children. We love knowing that they are not here forever, and we deem that risk worth it. More so than maybe like a carton of milk or some food that’ll go bad, right? So some risks are more worth it. But what about money? What about possessions? Is this worth the risk? Is it worth the risk to love wealth? Because it is not a controversial statement to say wealth is temporary. It is not a mind-blowing fact to say money doesn’t

last. So, the Kohelet will point out in our passage today in verse 15. As a rich man came from his mother’s womb, so he will go again, naked as he came. He will take nothing for his efforts that he can carry in his hands. Now, that’s a poetic way of stating the absolute obvious, right? We know that. We’re not taking anything with us. Naked as we came, naked we will go. That’s not a controversial statement. And yet, all of us are so defensive about our stuff. We are so wanting more, and so wanting to justify our thirst for more. All of us. Therefore, because of this being in us, passages like this one will always be relevant. They will never fade away as though we can check this off a box like we got this down, ever. And sermons like this, reminders like this one that we will all receive this morning will always be necessary. And so

Five Things to Remember

before we hop into the text, I want to give us five things to remember as we think about wealth today. I want you to have these, like, tuck these away as we make our way through the text, okay? And when you’re tempted to forget them, maybe write them down and look back at it for a second, okay? So the first thing that I want you to know before we make our way in as we think about wealth is nobody here is asking for your money. Nobody. I was not flown in to preach some sermon and then give some special offering afterwards. I swear they could have found someone way better at talking about this stuff than me if that was the goal, okay? And for all intents and purposes, this sermon isn’t going to be all that practical. This is not going to be suggestions or advice about what you

ought to do with your money. I hope nobody walks away from this sermon thinking, like, oh, he was suggesting that I should invest in this, or I should quit my job here, or that’s not what I’m saying. Most of what the Kohelet is aiming at is our heart. Our internal love for wealth is what we are mostly going to think about this morning. Second thing, everybody here is tempted to love money. Everybody. There is no outlier in this room right now at all. Greed is not a them issue. It’s an us issue, and always will be. It always will be. And so it doesn’t matter how much more they have than you. That doesn’t mean you point the finger and say, oh, greed is much more of a temptation for them. That’s just dishonest. We are all tempted to love money. So everything we’ll say this

morning, the Kohelet will point out to us, is relevant to us personally. Third thing, nobody has ever found happiness in money. I like to let that settle in a bit. Because I think our most natural instinct is we want to argue with that a little bit. We want to push back against the absoluteness of that statement. Like, oh, no, surely I can think of somebody who’s rich and it made them really, really happy, right? There’s a famous comedian who has a joke who says, people say money doesn’t buy happiness, but you know what it does buy? Is a wave runner. And have you ever seen somebody unhappy on a wave runner? And I’m not one that likes to overanalyze jokes, but if you think about that for just a second, that becomes a really dark observation. Because of course you have. You have seen a lot of miserable people on wave runners and yachts and who

own islands who are also depressed and suicidal. So of course you have. Money has never provided eternal and lasting joy to anybody. One writer, Derek Hidner, said humans with eternity in their hearts need more nourishment than anything money can offer. That’s true. Fourth one is everybody needs a better way forward than make money then die. Everybody needs a better way forward than make money then die. And we know that won’t cut it. We know it. Nobody here is going to look at someone else’s child and say, hey, the best life that you could live is that you would go on and make a bunch of money and then die. Nobody, right? Ray Ortlund, Pastor Ray Ortlund said, the wise know they can’t get home by the wrong road. And I’d love for that to settle into your mind. As we talk about wealth this morning, we need a better way forward. The wise know that

whatever doesn’t cut it, they got to find a different road. Number five, and I want you to remember this even as I speak negatively at times, God doesn’t hate wealth, but God loves us. God doesn’t hate wealth. In fact, in the passage it’ll even say God gave, God gives wealth, but God loves us. See, God knows money will never satisfy us, and he knows you are tempted to love money and therefore end up unsatisfied. So God regularly warns us against the dangers of loving money. But it is love for you, not hatred for wealth, that motivates these warnings. But there’s some severe warnings. Places like 1st Timothy 6 will say those who desire, there it is, internal love inside, those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all

The Credible Warning

kinds of evil. Or Jesus, our Lord, simply stated it this way, no one can serve two masters, you cannot serve God and money. And that’s the bottom line. That’s what we’re tempted to do, is to forfeit God, who is the source of all joy, for a lesser God in whatever money can get us. But nowhere in Scripture, so those are some pretty severe warnings, but nowhere in Scripture are the warnings about loving wealth more personal than in the book of Ecclesiastes. What we find in this book is a picture of a man who believed the lie, money can buy happiness. And what we find in the book is him, undone, in the fetal position, on the bathroom floor, at rock bottom, saying it wasn’t enough. Much of what he writes can be read as journal entries. So for example, in chapter 2, starting in verse

4, he says, I increased my achievements. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. I made gardens and parks for myself and planted every kind of fruit tree in them. I constructed reservoirs for myself, from which to irrigate a grove of flourishing trees. I acquired male and female servants and had slaves who were born in my house. I also owned livestock, large herds and flocks, more than all who were before me in Jerusalem. I also amassed silver and gold for myself and the treasure of kings and provinces. I gathered male and female singers for myself and many concubines, the delights of men. So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem, all that my eyes desired. I did not deny them. I did not refuse myself any pleasure, for I took pleasure in all my struggles. When I considered all that I had accomplished, listen to the heartbreaking realization of the old

man curled up on the bathroom floor at rock bottom saying, I considered all that I had accomplished and what I had labored to achieve. I found everything to be heavil, a pursuit of the wind. There was nothing to be gained under the sun. The preacher, in a very personal way, warns that a life of wanting wealth is a life that will be wasted. And what we need to understand is, he describes there a life that if all of us had the opportunity, we would choose that. He says, I deny myself nothing, none of the pleasures that I wanted. I denied myself. I had it all, and it amounted to nothing. But you see what this does is, it means that his warning has credibility. You understand? He tried it. It didn’t work. You know, the saying, money doesn’t buy happiness, it sounds like something poor people say to make themselves feel better, right? Or money doesn’t buy

happiness sounds like something rich people say to sound humble, right? But there’s a big difference between a 30-year-old rich guy telling you that he spent his life pursuing wealth and it was a waste, and that there’s a huge difference than when a 90-year-old guy tells you, right? A 90-year-old who’s standing at the finish line, who has the life that if you could wave a magic wand, you would get, you would want, you would ask for, and he says, it’s not worth it. It’s not worth it. And so we need to listen to his warnings very clearly, very soberly, and we need to listen to them honestly. Because here is a man who tried it and warns that it didn’t cut it. So I’m gonna do a bit of review real quick, just so we’re all on the same page. I know that you guys have probably heard

this multiple times before that, but I’m gonna review a couple of the words that are gonna come up in this passage. The first is hevel. It’s this Hebrew word, it’s probably the biggest theme throughout the book, and it has sort of a double meaning. So its literal meaning is breath, or mist, or vapor, or smoke, right? So that’s like the literal meaning. But the way that the teacher of Ecclesiastes uses it is sort of the effect of trying to grab the smoke or the vapor. So it can be understood as something like frustrating, or unreliable, or a contradiction. My favorite translation of it is just absurd. So he’ll use this word to describe things like the race doesn’t always go to the fastest runner, the battle doesn’t always go to the strongest one, or money seems like it should buy happiness, but it doesn’t. Hevel. Hevel. And what this matters to us

is because he is going to say that is what a life is like in pursuit of money. It’s like hevel. The second review that I want you to see is the context, for the whole book is under the sun. Now what he’ll do often, every once in a while, he pulls God down and his perspective down. But for the most part of the book, he is just observing. He is looking out at the world as we know it, as we see it. And what he sees is time, and chance, and death. They govern this place. That’s what he sees. It is this broken place under the sun. Can God fix it? Yes, but he is here looking out under the horizon and not willing to pull the perspective of Almighty God down. But the third reminder that I want you to know is the Kohelet. This is the teacher. And this has a double meaning as

well. This word means a gatherer or a assembler. Now the reason that it’s translated preacher or teacher is because that typically means people. Like he’s gonna gather people and he’s gonna teach them stuff. But the other way that this is used is he gathers and assembles observations. He sees stuff. And that matters for what we’re going to look at today, because he gives very few moral judgments. Very few where he’s like, that’s bad, this is good. You should do this. You shouldn’t do this. What he mostly does is he walks around and he points stuff out. This is what I saw. This is what I see. Here is where it is. And that is important when it comes to the topic of wealth. He comes at it from a perspective that says, I’m showing you what I see. He’s not necessarily saying it’s awful. I mean, you could choose whether you want this or that. But he’s

Unsatisfied Hearts

saying, I’m pointing it out to you. This is what I see under the sun. And today, the Kohelet takes on the topic of the myth of wealth under the sun. And I want to explain that the way that this passage is built. So it’s a little bit nerdy, but it is known what we would call a chiasm. Meaning, and this is important, this is how the passage is set up. So like the two ends will be there in the middle, or there at the ends, and then you kind of work your way up towards the middle, and the middle is the point. And the reason that this matters, it’s not just like a nerdy way to read the Bible, the reason that this matters is if you read the passage in a linear way, you end up with essentially the message, money’s real bad, and you miss his actual point. But what it’s

doing is it’s building towards a very specific point. His recommendation of life under the sun. And it looks something like this. So on the two sides, you have that he is saying an unsatisfied life, an unsatisfied life. And then before it gets better, it gets worse. And he’s gonna point out a couple of tragedies, what he calls tragedies or grievous evils. But there in the middle is his recommendation, his point, where he’s going with all of it, is he wants us to have joy. But that’s where we’re going, and we’ll see how we get there. It’s gonna be a rough ride. You guys ready? Alright, first thing that we’re going to point out is what he sees. It’s just reality under the sun, and what he sees is a bunch of unsatisfied people. And what he points out is our love for wealth is never satisfied. Our love for wealth is never satisfied. So now,

finally, look to the text. Look at verse 10 with me, if you would. It says, He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income. This also is Hevel. When goods increase, those who consume them increase. And what advantage has their owner to see them with his eyes? It says, Sweet is the sleep of a laborer who doesn’t have very much, whether he eats little or much, but the full stomach of the rich will not let him sleep. And what he describes here is greed, this insatiable love for wealth. It gives you no peace. It keeps you up. It won’t let you rest. But here, Kohelet is not pointing fingers, and we need to understand that. That’s actually really important. He makes it universal. He says, Anybody who would love money will not be satisfied with money. It doesn’t matter how much you get. If you love wealth, you will never be

satisfied with your income. And that’s his observation, is it doesn’t matter who you are. It’s not like some particular type of personality that somehow will be satisfied, but others will not be. He’s saying it’s universal. If you love wealth, you’ll never have enough. If you love money, you’ll never have enough. And here’s the thing about this, with verse 10, when it says, If you love money, you’ll never have enough. Again, I don’t think that’s a controversial statement. I don’t think that’s a mind-blowing thing to point out to any of us. I think the majority of us in this room are old enough to know this. We’ve seen enough. We’ve seen and met enough miserable rich people to let us know like, Yeah, that’s probably true, right? So why do we keep doing this? Why do we keep falling in love over and over again, believing that we’ll somehow be

the exception, and we want more and more and more? And Pastor John Omwucheka, who wrote a little devotional on Ecclesiastes, he said, I think he pointed it out the best. He says, We’re committed to seeing money in its best life, even if the light is artificial. Why? Because that’s what you do when you’re in love. And when it comes to money, we’re in love. That’s why. We’re in love. And we need to come to terms with this. We are in a toxic, abusive relationship with money. And we think that we can be the one to change them. We think if we hang in there long enough, we think if we put in the time, and we sacrifice enough, and we overlook its blemishes and its downfalls, we think that we are the one that we can change them. And though one day, one day, money will love us back.

Money will treat us like we wish it would treat us. But friends, it never does, and it never will. Jesus warns in Matthew 13 of the deceitfulness of wealth. You know what he’s saying there? Wealth lies to us. Lies to us. It tells us that it’ll love us better than God will. Wealth tells us it’ll keep us safer than God can. We’re more secure when we have more, more than God can keep us secure. And we believe it. Why? Why do we keep on believing it? Because we love it. We love it. And he says, if you love money, you’re never going to be satisfied with money. It’s never enough. But he saw something else. He says, it’s not just wealth. It’s not just money. He branches it out at the end of the passage. He says, our appetite for more is never satisfied. So, money is actually just a symptom of that. It’s just a smaller part of that.

We always want more, and we are never satisfied, and we’re never full. So, look what he says in verse 7 of chapter 6. It says,

all the toil of man is for his mouth, yet his appetite is not satisfied. For what advantage has the wise man over the fool, and what does the poor man have who knows how to conduct himself before the living? Listen, better is the sight of the eyes. That means something you actually have, that you can actually see, that you can actually touch, like it’s in your possession. Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite, just always wanting more, because he says that is Hevel and is striving after the wind.

— Ecclesiastes 6

(ESV)

What he’s saying here is we’re never full. We’re just constantly wanting more. We’re like a morbidly obese person that just constantly eats and is never content with what they have. They want more.

That’s the picture here. He’s just constantly working to get more and more, to eat more and more, and we’re never full. And this is why, because more never satisfies, this is why we continue to imagine that one day, one day, we’re going to like turn a corner and be happy. We’re going to end up with the right raise, or we’ll pay off some debt, or we’ll get some promotion, and then, and then we’ll be satisfied. We believe that, that there’s some magic number that if we can get to, but this is how, that is exactly how greed flourishes in our hearts and in our lives, because there is no magic number. What he’s saying is you’ll eat that and you’ll still be hungry. You’ll get that and you will never be full. And the thing is, is we don’t even know what the magic number is. Oftentimes, we just keep thinking, okay, maybe then. Okay,

maybe then. We just keep eating and we’re never full. Our appetite for more is never satisfied. And he’s going to move on. And again, it gets darker before it gets better. And he says, look back now at verse 13. He describes now what he sees. He describes now what he sees as, ESV says, a grievous evil. And I think that’s good. And he’ll say the same phrase in verse 13, verse 16, chapter 6, verse 1, and verse 2 in chapter 6. Grievous evil is great, except that oftentimes, I think what we’re going to think of is a moral evil, and that’s not necessarily what he’s seeing. What he’s seeing is evidence of evil. What he’s seeing is something that’s broken, something that’s off, something that ought not to be that way. I like how the CSB translated it as a sickening tragedy, a dark, broken thing

that shouldn’t be that way, something that breaks your heart when you see it. And that’s what he describes here, is what he calls a tragedy. So, look with me at verse 13 in chapter 5. It says, there is a tragedy that I have seen under the sun. Riches were kept by their owner to his hurt, and those riches were lost in a bad venture. And again, no moral application there. Bad venture could have been unwise, could have been sinister. We don’t know. He just lost everything. He just lost everything that he had. And he said, and he is a father of a son, and he has nothing in his hand to leave to his son. As he came from his mother’s womb, he shall go again naked as he came and shall take nothing for his toil that he may carry away in his hand. This also is a tragedy. Just as he came,

so shall he go. And what gain is there to him who toils for the wind? Moreover, all his days he eats in darkness, in much vexation, or he’s stressed out, and sickness, and anger. The first tragedy that Kohelet sees under the sun is our wealth will often give us pain. Our wealth will give us pain. And what you can picture here is a tour, okay? This is how I like to think of the book of Ecclesiastes, is the teacher kind of taking us by the hand and walking us around under the sun and just sort of pointing out things that he sees. And it’s very helpful to picture it that way, but here, what you picture is maybe like a display, like plexiglass surrounding, and in that display is a rich guy. You just picture this rich person sitting there in the dark. And you know he’s rich somehow. I don’t know, maybe his suit’s really expensive

or something. Maybe he’s sitting on a pile of money or something. I don’t know. But you can picture he’s very, very rich. And he says, but keep looking, keep watching. What do you see? You see no other people. And what you see is him sitting there eating alone in the darkness. That represents he’s just alone. He has no close relationships. However, he’s got there, he’s abandoned them. But then it says also he’s stressed out of his mind, he’s sick, and he’s angry all the time, and he’s lonely. That’s what he sees. And he says that he won’t give it up. He says he’s holding on to it, even though it’s leading him into a life that is lonely and stressed and sick and angry. That’s the life he’s leading. And so what he’s seeing is our wealth will give us pain. And friends, we ought to know that because we see so many examples of this, so many of them.

Every drug-addicted, depressed, suicidal, wealthy celebrity ought to function like a giant warning sign to the rest of the world. They should function as a warning to each and every one of us. This isn’t it. Look for happiness somewhere else because they will have more money than any of us will ever have. And it didn’t do it. It didn’t cut it. It should be for us a warning to look for satisfaction. Look for the good life somewhere else because that ain’t it. Every documentary on a celebrity that went broke ought to function as a parable teaching all of us that money has an expiration date. It’s fading even as we’re trying to hold on to it. It’s smoke slipping through our fingers. All of it, all of it should scream out to us, don’t love it. Don’t love it. It’s not worth it. And again, he’s saying that he saw this guy.

That’s what he’s saying. He’s saying, don’t love money because it won’t love you back. But he’s not saying that’s a universal truth. He’s just pointing it out to us. He’s saying, look, it didn’t work. Is that worth loving? The second tragedy that he sees is by far the darkest one in the entire passage. The next thing he says is our wealth will not give us rest. And here he uses a graphic image of a rich guy and a baby, and a baby who never lived, never went on to live, who died in the womb. And he says that the baby is better off because the baby got to rest. But he describes this rich guy this way. Look, he says in verse one of chapter six, there is a tragedy that I have seen under the sun and it lies heavy on mankind. Now that’s strong language, okay, that he does when he wants us to pay attention to this.

This is a heavy burden on all of humanity. He says, I saw a man to whom God gave wealth, possessions, and honor so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires, okay? He has everything. Now this is like as hyperbolic of a picture as you could possibly have. This is the richest guy that you could possibly picture, okay? And he describes this in a couple different ways. He says he lacks nothing of all that he desires, yet God does not give him the power to enjoy them. But a stranger enjoys them. And then he goes on and he says, if this man fathers a hundred children and lives many years so that the days of his years are many, but then he go to the end of the passage and in verse six he says, even though he should live a thousand years, twice over, yet not and

yet enjoy no good thing, do not all, doesn’t everybody just die? He says, doesn’t everybody just go to the same place? So he has this picture of the richest person you can imagine. In their context, someone who had a hundred kids, that’s a surefire legacy, right? That’s as wealthy as you can be. And then he just says, he has so many possessions. He has all of it. And yet he says right here in verse five, he’s speaking here of the baby. He says, moreover, this baby didn’t see the sun or know anything, yet it finds rest rather than the rich guy. Says at least the baby found rest. At least the baby didn’t go on in a life pursuing the wind. He found rest. See, this man spent his whole life believing wealth and possessions would eventually leave him happy and content. But the Kohelet says, you could give him a thousand years. You can give him two thousand

Finding True Joy

years if you want to. He’d still never find it. He’d still never find it. Instead, he’d end up in the exact same place as a person who lived zero years. Because he says contentment, contentment becomes like smoke when you search for it in money. Again, John Amocheka said this, a life spent chasing money is a life turning its back on contentment. It’s like smoke. But I wonder if you believe that, brothers and sisters. I wonder if you believe that. I wonder if you’re still pushing back on all that the Kohelet is pointing out to us. No, no, no, no. I’m the exception, right? I’m gonna be real smart with my money. I’m gonna love it a little bit, but I’m gonna love other stuff more. I wonder if you’re convinced yet. But then as he wanders about, he sees something that he says is good. He sees something that he says is good right here at the center of the passage, what he calls

joy. Look at verse 18. Verse 18, he says, behold, I have seen. So we’re walking around and he says, hey, I got something to point out to you. I’ve seen something that I’ve seen. I’ve seen something to be good and fitting. And this word fitting is most commonly translated in your Bibles as beauty or beautiful. And that’s how it should be translated. That’s like what it means. He says, I found something that I would describe as beautiful on his tour under the sun amidst all that is broken. Again, amidst all of these tragedies, he found something that he calls good and beautiful. So all of us who are exhausted with the failings of wealth, everybody sit up and say, okay, what, what is good? What is beautiful? I’m ready. What is good? What is beautiful? I don’t know if we’re ready for what he has to say, because the first thing

he says is our ordinary life can bring us joy. The most normal, the most basic. Listen to what he says.

Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun, the few days of his life that God has given him for his lot. Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them and to accept his lot, to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil. This is the gift of God, for he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart.

— Ecclesiastes 5

(ESV)

So the first thing he says that he saw is he saw people who were eating and drinking together. And this always has the connotation of friendship, of family. Like you just picture

like around like a holiday table, eating meals together. And he says that is the place of joy. That’s, that’s where I saw joy. I saw something beautiful is when people were eating and drinking together and being with one another. That means what he saw is friendship is beautiful. That’s what he saw. He looked around and he says, money ain’t it. But man, look at these people eating together. I see joy there. And then he says, I saw where work can be a source of joy as well. When you, when you enjoy what you’re doing, says that’s good labor. That is good. And again, remember this, and I’m probably sick of me pointing this out. This isn’t necessarily his like recommendation. He’s just saying, this is what I see. You’re looking for joy. Hey, I saw it somewhere. You want something beautiful in this broken place. I found it. I saw it somewhere.

And so what this means practically for you guys, can I say this to you, Trinity church, the local church ought to be a catalyst for these beautiful things. They, they must be. If we have this pointed out to us and we’ve seen it first, we got to be catalysts for this. Like things like small groups need to be a priority where we can actually be in each other’s homes, in each other’s lives. Because he said, that’s beautiful. That’s a place where you can find joy. That means friendships can’t become extra. They can’t, they need to move their way up in on our priority list as something that we invest in. Because he said, there’s joy there. There’s joy there. Now we, we would all say, right? That all of this is costly. It’s costly. It’s always a sacrifice. But what the Cohalit saw was those were the places that we found joy and friendship. Next, he said, our limited wealth

can bring us joy. In verse 20, he said, he said, for he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart. He says, just before that, he says, he can accept his lot and rejoice in his toy. It means he doesn’t have a whole lot. He doesn’t have a whole lot, but his life passes by not because it’s short, not just because it’s short, but because he’s happy. He’s happy. He has enough. He fell out of love with wealth and he’s just accepted. This is my life that I’m, I’m living. I love Pastor Charlie Date says, maturity is when you can look at more and say, no, thanks. I’ve got enough. That’s such a very biblical thought to understand that’s what the Cohalit saw. That’s where joy was. Okay. But now we have a question that I think we all ought to ask. So he found joy.

How do we get there? How do we have that? Okay. It wasn’t found in the unsatisfaction and the promises of wealth and the tragedy of loving wealth. He found joy, but where, how do we have that? How can we get that? Well, here, the key word in this section of the middle section is God. Okay. The, the central passage of this entire thing is the word God. Verse 18, twice in verse 19, verse 20, chapter six, verse one, and twice in verse two, God, God, God, all in the center of the passage left out on the fringes over and over again, repeated in the middle. And then this concept in verse 19, look at verse 19. It said, I’m sorry. yeah. Verse 19, everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them. And then in verse two of chapter six, it says a man to whom God gives wealth, possessions

and honor so that he lacks nothing of all that he desires yet. God does not give him the power to enjoy them. And remember, Cohalit’s just pointing this out. He said, man, I saw some people where they had a bunch of stuff. And I saw some other people that had a bunch of stuff. Some of them found joy. Some of them did not. And he said, I found that I found the factor in those. God gave one the power to enjoy them. God did not give power to enjoy them to the other one. What the teacher of Ecclesiastes finds under the sun is this. And this is key to our understanding of this entire passage is God is the source of joy of life under the sun now and for all eternity. And again, that’s his conclusion from his observations. He says, apart from God,

you will not find joy. If God withholds power to enjoy, you won’t find it. He’s the source of it. So what this teaches us is that some of the most miserable people in the world are some of the wealthiest, but not because wealth inherently made them miserable, but because they fell in love with something other than the source of joy.

The Source of Joy

And I think the warning of this entire passage, friends, is don’t do that. Don’t fall in love with anything that is not the source of joy. Where is satisfaction? Where is contentment under the sun? Where is joy in God? In God, we must go to God. We must trust him and him alone to be the source of joy in this life. But again, we come to the question, if we’re honest enough with ourselves, how? We have abandoned God. We didn’t believe him. We looked for joy in a million other places. Wealth might be on the list, but it’s a long list. Right? The Bible calls this abandonment, this lack of belief in God, sin. And we have all sinned. It’s in all of us. It’s Adam needing one more tree. I have all of this. I want one more. That’s in all of us. But God did not leave us to our sin. Instead, God came to us in the person of Jesus.

The source of joy came to us amidst the tragedy and the unsatisfaction under the sun. He came and he looked us in the eye and he said, Beloved, abandon all of those empty, hollow, temporary sources of joy and come and have the real thing. Come and have the real thing. I’ll close with the story of the man who had an abundance of wealth. And he ran up to God, the very source of joy and said, Teacher, what must I do to have eternal life? He asks him, I want something permanent. I want something permanent. And Jesus looks at him and says, you know, obey some of the commandments. And he throws out a couple of them. And he looks at him and he says, I have done those, but I want it didn’t do the trick. It wasn’t enough. I’m not happy. I’m not content. I want more.

And Jesus looks at him and says, go and give up everything you have. That stuff has a hold of your heart far too much. Go give that up. And then you come and follow me. The very source of joy. Come and follow me. And the man went away. What does it say? He went away doing grieving because he had too much stuff. Miserable. What a tragedy to walk away from the source of joy. Miserable because you had too much. And Jesus looked at his disciples and said, everyone who gives up anything for my name will receive a hundred times more and will inherit eternal life. No more vapor, no more smoke. Eternity. Jesus promises that a life given up for him will be a life that will be eternal. Jesus gave us his everything. He left the glories and riches of heaven to join us in the dirt and die on the cross for our sakes. He paid for our

He paid for our love for lesser things. He paid for our unbelief. He paid for our sins in full. And now he calls us to give up everything we have to follow him. And I believe at first that sounds scary. It really does. But in reality, it is the safest decision you could ever make. It is. It is giving up lesser things for the source of joy. I said in the beginning to love anything with an expiration date is a risk, but to love an eternal King who is himself the source of all eternal joy is not a risk at all. In fact, it’s the safest place you could be.

And so I want to call you at the end with joy. Give up everything you have for Jesus. Everything lesser loves, whatever that might be. Maybe it’s wealth, but maybe it’s something else. Give it all up. And if you never have like you’re here this morning and you don’t understand yourself to be a follower of Jesus, let today be that first time. Let the day be that first time where you said these lesser things did not cut it. I’m willing to come to Jesus who promises to be the source of all joy. And if you do consider yourself a Christian, but you can’t think of a time where you said, ‘You know what, I’m giving up everything in order to follow Jesus.’ I’ve held on to way too much and it has not cut it. It has not been enough today. Let today

be the day that you settle it. Everything. And brothers and sisters who are here, if you are a Christian and you have joyfully given up everything to follow after him, then this morning, can you just please be reminded that it was worth it and it is worth it and it will be worth it. Thank you guys. Let me pray. Father in heaven, I praise you. I praise you for the promises here. I thank you so much, God, for the book of Ecclesiastes and over and over again, how it just feels so relevant that this teacher’s observations feel as relevant today as they have for thousands of years, that this temptation towards wealth is a temptation that is universal and constant. But thank you so much for Jesus who, without batting an eye, invited us to give up everything in order to follow him, knowing, knowing that it was worth it.

Would you help us to trust that today? In Jesus name. Amen.